Road_Track_July_2017

T H E M O T O R E N T H U S I A S T S ’ M A G A Z I N E S I N C E 1 9 4 7
JULY 2017
70th ANNIVERSARY
SPECIAL ISSUE
THE LEGENDS 1995 McLAREN F1
1954 JAGUAR D-TYPE | 1967 PORSCHE 911 S
1972 BMW 3.0 CSL | 1987 RUF YELLOW BIRD
& THE LATEST
McLAREN 720S | ACURA A NSX
JAGUAR F-PACE S
| BMW X5 M
PORSCHE MACAN GTS
PLUS
ROAD TRIP WITH PETER EGAN
EXPLORE THE R&T ARCHIVES | MOTORSPORT MILESTONES
S
THE NUMBERS: HIGHLIGHTS FROM 70 YEARS OF TESTING
TING

WE DIDN’T JUST BUILD
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WE BUILT ONE
TO MAKE SURE
YOU WERE.

NSX GT3 Race Car shown. ©2017 Acura. Acura, NSX, and the stylized
“A” logo are registered trademarks of Honda Motor Co., Ltd.

When you create a New Sportscar eXperience, you don’t chase the competition—
you chase your dreams. You build a facility that manufactures one thing:
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JULY 2017
VOL. 68, NO. 10
A N N I V E R S A R Y
30
THE ORAL HISTORY
McLAREN F1
The incredible life of the 20th century’s fastest supercar,
as told by the people who know it best. BY SAM SMITH
46
THE FIRST DRIVE
2018 McLAREN 720S
The latest supercar from Woking finally looks
as exciting as it drives. BY CHRIS CHILTON
54
THEN & NOW
A RACER RUNS THROUGH IT
Racing icons from BMW, Jaguar, and Porsche on track with
their distant crossover descendants. BY SAM SMITH
72
DRIVING WITH
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Revisiting the 211-mph Yellow Bird and the man
who built it, Alois Ruf. BY SAM SMITH
88
THE JOURNEY
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Three decades after heading west in a Dino 246 GT, our veteran
scribe retraces his route in the new NSX. BY PETER EGAN
98
MOTORSPORT
MOMENTS THAT MATTERED
Ten turning points that transformed the world of racing.
BY PRESTON LERNER
GO
THE R&T ARCHIVES 9
ROAD TEST SUMMARY
70 YEARS OF PERFORMANCE 106
COLUMNS
LETTERS ALFA AND LEXUS POLARIZE 16
EDITOR’S LETTER THE THRILL REMAINS 18
SMITHOLOGY ON NOSTALGIA 24
SIDE GLANCES MORE BIRTHDAY CANDLES 26
BOB LUTZ THE INDUSTRY: 70 YEARS 112
COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY EVAN K LEIN
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 7

SEVENTY YEARS OF CAPTURING THE LIFE AT SPEED
The racing, the cars, the heroes. Since 1947, Road & Track has been there for it all. The proof is in our archives,
hundreds of nondescript manila folders stuffed with photographs, race reports, correspondence, and manuscripts.
They provide a quiet reminder of mortality: Many of the files’ subjects, and the people who cataloged them,
are no longer with us. But digging through the contents brings the past to life. Enzo Ferrari glares from a
Kodachrome slide. The Lamborghini Miura’s performance screams through scribbled test notes.
Here’s a glimpse at a handful of the relics collected over seven decades of celebrating speed.
Jim Clark flips through the September 1963 issue at the Italian GP.
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 9

10
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

THE RACING
R&T was one of the first American publications to
showcase the grandeur of European grand-prix racing,
but it treated local dirt ovals, hill climbs, and club meets
with just as much reverence. As motorsport expanded
and the world got smaller, the scope of coverage
evolved, but the passion has never waned.

THE ICONS
Phil. Innes. Jackie. Sam. Mario.
R&T has always observed its heroes up close.
In so many fading photographs, one senses
the kinship—not just among racing drivers but
the whole community of enthusiasts.
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ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

THE CARS
Longtime editor John Bond’s
first story, in June 1948, was
headlined “What Is a Sports Car?”
The answer has changed—
current cover cars have as much
in common with the Mars Rover
as a Healey roadster—but the
question is eternal.

R O A D A N D T R A C K . C O M J U LY 2 0 1 7 15

Letters
LEXUS HAS A NEW LOOK, NOT A LOOKER.
Dear R&T,
In your comparison test [“Rising Tide,” March/April],
you say of the Alfa, “Hiccups are to be expected.”
Are they really? For $85,000, the seats better sound
like gold rubbing against diamonds. I’m glad you guys
did not give it the win.
PRESCOTT THOMPSON, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
You should have at least acknowledged
that the Alfa outclassed the Merc and
the BMW in every one of your objective
performance categories (0–60, braking,
top speed, etc.).
ANTHONY PALLADINO
RESTON, VIRGINIA
Noted. But numbers aren’t everything.
The Mercedes beat the Alfa in nearly
every other facet.
What bothered me was the whipping
you gave the M3, a car with a $10,000
cheaper base price and down 60 hp.
DOUG BAUER
VERO BEACH, FLORIDA
What’s with that tacky plastic plate on
the Giulia’s grille? It’s like a wart on a
beautiful woman’s face—I can’t help
wincing when I see it.
JIM JISTEL
HOUSTON, TEXAS
You will have to do a special article
on the technique used for maximum
acceleration in the Mercedes C63. Right
foot on brake and left foot on accelerator
sounds like something only a ballerina
could manage.
TERRY H. PHILLIPS
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
Our regrettable error—our tester mixed
up right and left in the notes. Either
that or he has strange anatomy.
BEAUTY CONTESTER
I have never paid attention to Lexus, but
the LC 500 is definitely an exception
[“Lexus Rising”]. The clean, sweeping
lines are a pleasure to behold. If only it
didn’t have that damn grille. And the
useless black slashes hanging down
from the lights, the ugly black smear
running beneath the side and rear
windows, the chrome on top of the
mirrors. It seems the designers created
a well-crafted, aerodynamic body, then
the stylists took over.
DAVE PAYNE
FALLING WATERS, WEST VIRGINIA
I was shocked that Jason Harper raved
about the LC 500, an automobile meant
to be sporty, with a 10-speed automatic
that “hunts.” Perhaps Lexus should
have swallowed its pride and looked
to Ford and GM for their joint-venture
tranny. It’s good that the materials are
top-notch again, but the transmission
is something the driver interacts
with constantly. Having that as an
annoyance should deter prospective
buyers.
PAUL HORTON
WINSTON-SALEM, NORTH CAROLINA
Aside from the cachet of owning a
Lexus, who would buy this or any other
car with that front end? A lot of factors
are involved when I shop for a vehicle,
and trade-offs are made, but I’ll never
buy an ugly car.
DON WHISNANT
CARLSBAD, CALIFORNIA
MIATA MEN
I drive a supercharged 1992 Miata with
a manual, no ABS, and no airbags, in
Canadian winter. I cannot conceive
of how a four-wheel-drive SUV with
an automatic transmission and lanekeeping
assist could be anywhere near
that level of manliness. I say all this
ignoring the fact that the idea of a
“girl’s car” is pretty ridiculous anyway
[Smithology]. That said, my girlfriend
does love driving my Miata. I can only
conclude that she is more manly than
any Hummer owner.
ADRIAN HALL
LONDON, ONTARIO
We asked Smith for his opinion on
the subject. He said, “SUVs are for
twitterpated weenies.” That’s when
we decided to send him to the desert
to test three performance crossovers
(page 54).
16
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

Air Stryk II
S P E C I A L O P S W A T C H . C O M
Designed and hand-assembled in the US

Letters CONT.
EDITOR’S LETTER BY KIM WOLFKILL
When someone hurls the “girl car”
epithet at me in my Miata, I will look
up at the guy in his F-150 with its fullpower
accessory package, infotainment
system, and eight-foot-cab/five-foot-bed
configuration and reply, “Right back at
you, bud.”
TOM HAYKIN
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
LIKE MANY ENTHUSIASTS, I got my first taste of automobiles through
the pages of my dad’s favorite magazines. An avid motorsport and
sports-car fan himself, he subscribed to everything from On Track
and National Speed Sport News to Car and Driver. And, of course,
Road & Track. I consumed each with typical adolescent zeal, yet
R&T always stood apart. Every month delivered a fresh collection of cars to
dream about and new racing heroes to follow, all in one place.
At the time, I had no idea R&T had already been around for 30-plus years,
much less that I would be celebrating its 70th anniversary as editor-in-chief
nearly 40 years later. In the ensuing decades, much has changed—vehicles, technology,
priorities, personalities—but the singular experience of flipping through
each new issue remains. Rich storytelling and stunning photography, unrivaled
access, and quiet authority continue to be the foundations of every page.
This issue celebrates the last seven decades with a mix of past and present,
old friends, and new metal. We drive McLaren’s newest supercar, the formidable
720S (page 46), while also paying homage to the unworldly McLaren F1 (page
30), a car that redefined ultrahigh performance, and even 25 years later, still
serves as the benchmark for modern
Our mission, 70 years on,
remains the same: Bring
machines to life and spread
the gospel of the journey.
supercars.
We welcome back editor-at-large
Peter Egan, who treats us to an
anniversary edition of Side Glances,
as well as a contemporary take on
his memorable road-trip tale, “Dino:
Car of the North,” which appeared in
Road & Track’s March 1985 issue. This time around, Peter ditches the ’72 Ferrari
Dino for something a bit more current, our 2017 Performance Car of the
Year, the Acura NSX. Starting on page 88, he and his original travel partner,
Chris Beebe, retrace much of the same route as in ’85, discovering a landscape
and a driving experience that’s transformed in their absence, yet, in other ways,
seems untouched.
Ever the lover of all things classic, fast, and really fast, our other editor at
large, Sam Smith, rings in R&T’s 70th by celebrating some of the 20th century’s
most iconic automobiles. He rides shotgun with Alois Ruf in the original CTR
and discovers that the Yellow Bird is as absurdly fast today as it was in 1987
(page 72). And then, beginning on page 54, Smith serves up a rather unconventional
track test, where three historic race cars from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s are
joined by a trio of modern high-performance crossovers. Odd couples indeed.
Seven decades on, the thrill remains. The thrill of sharing unforgettable automotive
experiences with fellow enthusiasts. Of bringing machines to life and
spreading the gospel of the journey. Of creating a lasting relationship that’s built
on 70 years of trust between Road & Track and its loyal readers. A trust that’s
cherished and protected fiercely, today and for anniversaries to come. ■
Kudos to Seattle PD for hiring men who
appreciate fine automobiles.
TY HARDIN
OLIVE BRANCH, MISSISSIPPI
HEART OF THE MATTER
I really enjoyed the article about F1
champion retirees [“Enough?”]. It
showed the human side of some of the
superstars in the racing world.
RON MEEKER
FLINT, MICHIGAN
The reason for Nico Rosberg’s
retirement is obvious: Nico knows he is
not the best driver in Formula 1. Lewis
Hamilton is clearly better and will win
many more championships.
HAROLD W. GANS
ROSLYN, PENNSYLVANIA
STAGGERING SERVICE
Compliments on your report about
Jack Staggs’s garage in San Clemente
[Shops We Love]. On my second day in
town, I saw a Porsche 356 going south
and followed it right into Jack’s garage.
Before I could introduce myself, he
opened the hood of my 356 and said,
“I can’t look at this!” Without further
comment, Jack went to the back of his
shop and returned with a new fan belt.
He took the old one off, together with
10 spacers, and replaced it, using only
one spacer. “Bad for the car! Now, what’s
your name?” We have been good friends
ever since.
KLAUS POHL
CHANDLER, ARIZONA
Email us at letters@roadandtrack.com. Include your
full name, city, state, and daytime telephone number
for verification. We unfortunately cannot answer every
inquiry, and we reserve the right to edit letters. Editorial
contributions are considered only if guaranteed exclusive.
Materials are subject to Road & Track standard
terms, and the vendor must retain a copy. Photographs
should be released for publication by the source. Road &
Track is not responsible for unsolicited materials.
RICHARD PARDON
18
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

INTRODUCING
THE FIRST-EVER
LEXUS LC 500
WHAT STARTED AS PURE CONCEPT,
LAUNCHED A NEW ERA OF
PERFORMANCE AND DESIGN.
The LC 500 is a collection of visionary ideas. 10-speed Direct-Shift
transmission. Near-perfect weight distribution. An innovative suspension
system that defies conventional logic, accommodating available 21-inch
wheels* within a ground-hugging profile. The LC is also an uncompromising
approach to design. Although the first seat design was technically perfect,
it was the 50th prototype that had the exact fit and feeling to complement
the unique LC driving experience. This intense dedication to craftsmanship
and innovation results in a level of refinement you’ve never felt. A sound
you’ve never heard. And a feeling you have yet to experience. Introducing
the first-ever 5.0-liter V8 Lexus LC 500 and Multistage Hybrid LC 500h.
Experience the future of Lexus. Experience Amazing.
lexus.com/LC | #LexusLC
Options shown. *21-in performance tires are expected to experience greater tire wear than conventional tires. Tire life may be substantially less than 20,000 miles, depending upon driving conditions. ©2017 Lexus

Editorial Staff
Editor-in-Chief KIM WOLFKILL
Design Director MATT TIERNEY
Managing Editor MIKE FAZIOLI
Editors at Large PETER EGAN, SAM SMITH
Associate Editor KYLE KINARD
Photographer MARC URBANO
Deputy Editor DAVID ZENLEA
Copy Chief REBECCA JONES
Designer ADAM McGINN
Research Editor BETH NICHOLS
Road Warrior DANI SAFI
Editorial Director EDDIE ALTERMAN
Contributing Editors JACK BARUTH, CHRIS CHILTON, COLIN COMER,
JASON H. HARPER, PRESTON LERNER, RICHARD PINTO, MAX PRINCE, MARSHALL PRUETT
Contributing Artists & Photographers TIM BARKER, DW BURNETT, ROBERT KERIAN, EVAN KLEIN, RICHARD PARDON,
JAMEY PRICE, TOM SALT, JOSH SCOTT, DEAN SMITH, ANDREW TRAHAN, BILL WARNER, JEFFREY R. ZWART
Editorial Advisory Board CHIP GANASSI (RACING MOGUL), BOB LUTZ (VIPER CREATOR, EXEC),
SAM POSEY (PAINTER, RACER), BOBBY RAHAL (INDY 500 WINNER, TEAM OWNER)
Site Director TRAVIS OKULSKI
Deputy Editor BOB SOROKANICH
Web Editor CHRIS PERKINS
RoadandTrack.com Staff
Web Producer TYWIN PHAM
European Editor MÁTÉ PETRÁNY
Assistant Editor, Social Media BRIAN SILVESTRO
Publisher & Chief Revenue Officer FELIX DIFILIPPO
National Advertising Director CAMERON ALBERGO
General Manager, Hearst Men’s Group SAMANTHA IRWIN
Executive Director, Digital Advertising DEIRDRE DALY-MARKOWSKI
NEW YORK
East Coast Automotive Director JOE PENNACCHIO
East Coast Digital Sales Managers BRETT FICKLER, MIA S. KLEIN
CHICAGO
Integrated Sales Director RICK BISBEE
Integrated Midwest Manager MARC GORDON
Sales Assistant YVONNE VILLAREAL
DETROIT
Integrated Sales Director MARK FIKANY
Midwest Account Manager BRYCE VREDEVOOGD
Assistant TONI STARRS
LOS ANGELES
Integrated Sales Director ANNE RETHMEYER
Integration Associate MICHELLE NELSON
Assistant RICHARD PANCIOCCO
SAN FRANCISCO
Smith Media Sales, Inc. WILLIAM G. SMITH
DALLAS
PR 40 Media PATTY RUDOLPH
HEARST DIRECT MEDIA
Sales Manager BRAD GETTELFINGER
Administration
Advertising Services Director REGINA WALL
Advertising Services & Accolades Manager REBECCA TAROON
Executive Assistant to the Group Publishing Director
& Business Coordinator MARY JANE BOSCIA
The Blend Line
Executive Creative Director MAURY POSTAL
Production Director TIA DEVLIN
Branded Content Editor DAMIEN SCOTT
Project Director MEAGAN MAGINOT
Senior Manager, Media Strategy & Planning SCOTT TOPEL
Marketing Solutions
Associate Publisher & Group Marketing Director JILL MEENAGHAN
Executive Director, Integrated Marketing DAWN SHEGGEBY
Executive Creative Director, Group Marketing JANA NESBITT GALE
Director, Integrated Marketing AMANDA LUGINBILL
Director, Group Marketing YASIR SALEM
Senior Marketing Manager MICHAEL COOPERSMITH
Integrated Marketing Manager SANDY RAMOS
Art Director, Group Marketing MICHAEL SARPY
Art Director, Group Marketing ELENA MARTORANO
Integrated Marketing Coordinator VINCENT CARBONE
Senior Director, Digital Marketing SAMANTHA GLADIS
Director, Digital Marketing KELLY MARTIN
Senior Digital Marketing Manager A’NGELIQUE TYREE
Senior Digital Marketing Manager LEE ANNE MURPHY
Research Manager PETER DAVIS
Production/Operations
Director CHUCK LODATO
Operations Account Manager HARRY YEE
Premedia Manager ZACHARY SMITH
Circulation
Executive Director, Consumer Marketing WILLIAM CARTER
Senior Vice President & Publishing Director, Hearst Men’s Group JACK ESSIG
Published by Hearst Communications, Inc.
A Unit of the Hearst Corporation, 300 W. 57th Street, New York, NY 10019
President & Chief Executive Officer STEVEN R. SWARTZ
Chairman WILLIAM R. HEARST III
Executive Vice Chairman FRANK A. BENNACK, JR.
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Hearst Magazines Division
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GOOD NEWS
TRAVELS FAST
Introducing the ridiculously comfortable Hubbard Fast.
High performance cleverly cloaked in style.
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Live at Birdland
OBSESSIONS IN THE REARVIEW.
ROAD & TRACK has taught me a lot, but the first
thing I remember it telling me was that Ayrton
Senna was dead. Those quicksilver hands and
that yellow helmet, the last fiery icon in Formula 1,
snuffed at 34.
It was 1994. I was 13, and I had never bought a car magazine.
That first one I paid for had a $2.95 cover price and an August
date. I still have the thing, though I don’t know why. All I know
is that every time I try to throw it away, my arms freeze up.
Senna died in May of that year. By August, when this magazine
ran his obituary, I still had no clue he was gone. I barely
knew he was alive to begin with. Our city paper didn’t cover
motorsport, and at 13, I wasn’t reading it anyway. I didn’t watch
F1 on TV, and the nightly news always put me to sleep. Senna
was just this guy overseas, in a sport I little understood.
And then he died, in a race at Imola, and my $2.95 stack of
paper was upset. So I read.
I had been reading for years. Voraciously. Mostly history and
fiction, from my father’s bookshelf, because that’s what was in
the house and free. This is probably why, as the world’s dorkiest
middle schooler, I wanted little more than a Jaguar D-type, a
Ruf CTR, a North American X-15 rocket plane, a motorcycle, a
brown-haired girlfriend who would talk to me while I fixed said
motorcycle and brooded demonstrably, and a print of a photograph
taken by Jesse Alexander in 1962, of Jim Clark at Spa.
(Black and white, goggles around his neck, eyes boring a hole in
the camera. A whole era wrapped up in smoky silver.)
Clark died at Hockenheim, in a Formula 2 car, 13 years before
I was born. The most graceful driver of a generation, but just
one hero from a litany, and those books: Colin Chapman, the
virtuoso behind Lotus. Dan Gurney. Phil Hill
and Paul Frère, who each had astonishing
careers in the cockpit and then went to work
for R&T. Hundreds of other artists and iron
men, from prewar Indy to NASA.
All of them either died or wrapped their
glory days before my time. That’s what happens when you find
an obsession through its history—you gravitate to emotion, and
that usually means years ago, because nobody writes an epic
poem about yesterday afternoon. I became convinced I was
born too late.
Until Senna. A polarizing risk of a man in a sport that had
long seemed safe and level. I read those pages again and again,
feeling emptier each time. One of history’s brightest sparks,
missed, because I was too busy pining for the past.
Memories have a habit of going accordion, making old turning
points seem like yesterday. But if Road & Track is 70, then
Ayrton Senna has been gone for 23 years. The average 2017 F1
reporter couldn’t pick Jim Clark out of a lineup. Time dims the
stage lights on everybody.
And then there’s the Ruf CTR.
Or rather, the CTR, CTR001, the prototype. Thirty years ago,
in a tiny garage in Germany, a man named Alois Ruf disassembled
a late-model Porsche 911. When he put it back together,
it had two turbochargers and a body so pared down, the radio
antenna was taped to the windshield. A week later, in an R&T
test with Frère, Hill, and a mess of factory-built supercars, it
went 211 mph. Faster than any road car this magazine had ever
seen. We nicknamed it “Yellow Bird,” after the color and how it
moved. Ruf tooled up for production, the world beat a path to
He still owns the car, essentially as it was.
Blinding yellow paint, a mad howler of an engine,
value like a lottery jackpot. But there was more there.
his dyno room, and the Bird became one of the most beloved
European cars in history.
I didn’t discover that test until 10 years after it happened.
Not a too-late jaw drop, though. Clark and Senna are gone, but
you can find a 1980s 911 on half the street corners in America.
They’re relatable, attainable commodities, which is why whipping
one to 211 mph seems both touchable and voodoo, even in
2017. Which, in turn, may have been why I went to find Alois
himself (page 72). Last winter, in southern Germany, when the
Alps were dark and tipped with clouds. I figured the man would
know something about perspective.
JOE WINDSOR-WILLIAMS
24
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017
PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD PARDON

BMW & MINI parts
He still owns the car, essentially
as it was. Blinding yellow paint, a
mad howler of an engine, value like
a lottery jackpot. But there was more
there than just old 911. It was real and
storied in a way I couldn’t grasp or
describe, a breathing piece, the magazine’s
golden age writ in Technicolor.
Countless wins and losses, millions
of words. Paul and Phil but also John
Bond’s manners, Henry Manney’s
raised eyebrow, Peter Egan’s quiet
optimism, in everything from the
antenna tape to the hand-formed
NACA ducts in the rear fenders.
Old cars tend to ooze stories, but
this was different. Possibly because
the owner was different. Possibly
because he fed me an espresso when
I walked in the door, then insisted we
rip the Bird’s tach needle off the peg.
We talked for hours. Even in this
straightforward industry, defined by
numbers and regulation, the man
bubbles with happy surprises. Ruf’s
reputation could float his business for
years, but he keeps chasing new projects,
machines made better and more
involving and smarter. Like most of
my heroes, he seems incapable of discussing
his life without laughing.
And as with Senna and Clark, no
one saw him coming. Ruf’s appearance
reaffrmed everything we care
about around here. That surprises
are constant if you know where to
look. That while you can often guess
the arc of the world, you can’t predict
the points that plot the curve. Or the
power of a reset that shows up just
when you need it.
Maybe that’s why I kept the issue.
I didn’t know much at 13, but what
little I did, I don’t want to forget. ■
Sam Smith is an editor at large for
R&T. He keeps a lot of things.
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Friends for Life
GROWING UP WITH R&T.
SIDE GLANCES BY PETER EGAN
SO ROAD & TRACK IS TURNING 70 this summer.
Well, that’s a little scary.
I’ve been around for three of these decadeending
anniversaries, and I have to say, I’m
beginning to greet them with mixed emotions.
Why?
Well, because this magazine and I are almost the same age.
Which, of course, means that in a few months, Barb is going
to have to drive into town and buy more birthday candles.
My last cake looked like a wildfire burning out of control in a
national park, and if the next one puts out any more heat, I’ll be
able to weld with it.
Truth be told, R&T arrived in this
world just a bit earlier than I did. It
hit the streets in June of 1947 when
two Long Island sports-car enthusiasts
named Wilfred H. Brehaut Jr. and
Joseph S. Fennessy put the first issue
together. Shortly thereafter, it was
acquired by John and Elaine Bond, who
built it into a national publication.
But I myself did not appear until eight
months after that first issue, in faraway
Saint Paul, Minnesota. My parents—
who were not sports-car enthusiasts—
took me home from the hospital in a
maroon Kaiser-Frazer. R&T was not to
be found on our living room coffee table,
so I didn’t actually discover this magazine
until I was 13. Nevertheless, I can
remember that day quite vividly.
On a hot summer afternoon in 1961,
I found myself ambling down the main
street of Elroy, Wisconsin (pop. 1503),
on my way to the birthday party of my
pal and fellow car buff Brad Shrake. We were both big fans of
Indy and midget racing, but neither of us knew much (i.e., anything)
about European sports-car racing or Formula 1.
As I walked along the street in my neatly ironed plaid shirt,
some nonbarbaric voice from my preteen past (my mom’s, no
doubt) told me I should probably show up at the party with
some type of gift, so I ducked inside the air-conditioned comfort
of Lawrence’s Drug Store for a look at the car magazines.
Then, as now, I found it easiest to ponder gifts for others when
they were objects that I myself would want.
And there on the magazine rack were the August 1961
editions of two car magazines I’d never seen before. One was
Sports Car Graphic, and the other was Road & Track.
Friendly druggist Ken Lawrence explained to me that a college
kid named Chris Jepson had suggested he add these two
titles to his magazine roster. This made sense, because Chris
was a very cool guy who owned an MG TD, so I bought both
magazines—50 cents each—and went to the party.
When I got there, Brad was, as I recall, in the midst of a
manic table-tennis game with some other kids, so I sat down in
the corner and began to read the magazines.
I flopped one of them open and was immediately confronted
I pored over cutaway drawings of new cars,
memorized entire F1 grids, and assailed my poor
parents at the breakfast table with racing esoterica.
with a photo of Phil Hill and Richie Ginther in their purposeful
156 Sharknose Ferraris, chasing Stirling Moss’s gossamer
Lotus 18 through the streets of Monaco.
I looked at the beauty of those cars, beheld the curb-lined
streets of Monaco, the palm trees, and the sunlit harbor, and
suddenly a strange electrical current ran through my scalp. The
whole scene was infused with an aura of danger and glamour
unlike anything I’d ever seen. I was, as they say, a goner.
I left Brad’s party later, flying on a mixture of birthday-cake
frosting, caffeine-laden Sun Drop, and blinding new inspiration.
On the way home, I stopped again at the drug store and
26
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017
ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES A. ALLINGTON

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Side Glances CONT.
blew the rest of my week’s lawn-mowing income on my own
copies of both magazines. Little did I know that I was about to
make a whole bunch of new friends. For life.
When I got home, I read these magazines over and over, as
only the young zealot of a new religion can. I pored over cutaway
drawings of new cars, memorized entire F1 grids, and
assailed my poor parents at the breakfast table with so much
racing esoterica, I’m sure they couldn’t decide whether to weep
or just strangle me.
Naturally, I wasn’t smart enough
to leave these magazines in one piece,
and I immediately started snipping
pictures and articles out and pasting
them in my auto-racing scrapbook,
writing captions in my childish
scrawl, which has not improved with
time.
I still have the two cheap, spiralbound
auto-racing scrapbooks I kept
in junior high (dug them out of a storage
trunk yesterday), and you can see
the moment when sports cars and
European racing arrived. On one page
is a Saturday Evening Post article
about Indy hopeful Eddie Sachs titled
“Racing’s Haunted Driver.” Flip forward
a page and there’s that Monaco
street scene. After that, F1 and sports
cars predominate.
It didn’t take me long to notice who
was writing and illustrating all this
stuff, and the names on the masthead
of R&T became as familiar to
me as the starting roster of the Milwaukee
Braves had been a few years
earlier. John and Elaine Bond, Henry
N. Manney III, Dean Batchelor, Dave
Black, William A. Motta, James T.
Crow, Tony Hogg, and Gordon H.
Jennings were all suddenly part of my
world. And still are. Through the miracle of generational overlap,
I eventually got to know all these people—mostly World
War II veterans energized by that generation’s optimism and
good-to-be-alive spirit. I think Tom Brokaw named them right.
Probably my favorite all-time R&T photo, the cover shot of
our January 1962 issue, was taken by European correspondent
Henry Manney III. It’s a close-up, beautifully composed cockpit
shot of Phil Hill, our new American Formula 1 world champion,
behind the wheel of his Ferrari 156. I carefully trimmed
this cover off with a razor blade, framed it, and put it up on
the wall of my bedroom one cold winter night when I was in
eighth grade.
About 30 years later, Phil signed this picture for me while
we were working together on a story for R&T, and it’s hanging
in my workshop now. Fate also arranged for me to become
That I would ever have
had the chance to work
with these remarkable
gentlemen still seems a
kind of unlikely fantasy.
good friends with the photographer, Manney, who is also one
of my favorite writers. That I would ever have had the chance to
work with these two remarkable gentlemen still seems a kind
of unlikely fantasy. More so now that they’re gone.
In a similar twist of unreality, Barb and I became good
friends with Innes Ireland, former Scottish paratrooper, former
Team Lotus F1 driver, and R&T’s then F1 correspondent.
Innes used to stay at our house when visiting the magazine’s
old California offces. Whenever he
came, we would make dinner and
stock up on his favorite scotch, the
Famous Grouse.
One evening, we were sipping
scotch and discussing his last season
driving for Colin Chapman, 1961,
when Barb mentioned that I had an
old scrapbook from that very season.
Innes insisted on seeing it and opened
to a full-page photo of himself, winning
the USGP at the Glen. “Oh my,”
he said quietly. He then proceeded
to page through the scrapbook and
tell us the stories behind the photos.
I stared into my glass of Famous
Grouse and wondered at the strange
ways of the world.
Since then, writing for this magazine
has given me the opportunity to
do interviews and stories with quite a
few of my racing heroes—Dan Gurney,
Mario Andretti, Stirling Moss, the
Unsers, Jim Hall, Denny Hulme, and
other legends. All this while working
daily at an offce filled with some of
the finest people I’ve ever known.
When you’re almost the same age
as Road & Track—the biblical threescore
years and ten—you sometimes
look back at a life filled with all the
usual ups and downs, cloudy days,
occasional illness, loss and disappointment, and try to pick
out those few moments of outrageous good fortune, when the
weather vane suddenly swung in your direction and put life on
a better track.
Those moments for me would include meeting Barb, being
given my first full-time journalism job at Cycle World in 1980
by R&T alumnus (and now friend and mentor) Allan Girdler,
and, three years later, being asked by editor John Dinkel to
work at R&T (upstairs in the same building) when Allan was
about to retire.
And, of course, being invited to Brad Shrake’s birthday party.
My mom was right: Always bring a gift. ■
Peter Egan is an editor at large at R&T. He has been writing
Side Glances since 1983 and is a legend himself.
28
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

GO WHERE INSPIRATION
TAKES YOU.
When creating the first-ever Toyota C-HR, Toyota’s team
of global designers was inspired by a single theme: the
diamond, an iconic gemstone known for sophistication
and strength. They crafted the C-HR’s sleek lines and
distinctive exterior to create a silhouette that resembles
a diamond on its side. They also made sure its sporty 18-in.
alloy wheels* provide an appealing, yet strong, base. And
if something as small as a diamond can take Toyota in a
new direction, imagine where you could go in a C-HR.
Prototypes shown with options. Production models will vary. *18-in. tires are
expected to experience greater tire wear than conventional tires. Tire life may
be substantially less than 24,000 miles, depending on driving conditions.
©2017 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.

30
JULY 2017

THE ORAL HISTORY | McLAREN F1
THE ONE
IT’S BEEN CALLED THE GREATEST CAR
OF THE 20TH CENTURY. IT TURNS 25 YEARS OLD IN 2017.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE WORLD MEETS A LEGEND.
BY SAM SMITH | PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHARD PARDON

T
HE LAST GREAT ANALOG CAR WAS BUILT, in
just 107 examples, between 1992 and 1998.
The roadgoing version had a world-first
carbon-fiber frame; a 627-hp, 7500-rpm
BMW V-12; a six-speed manual gearbox;
and a driver’s seat mounted in the middle,
aping an open-wheel race car. You did not
get anti-lock or power brakes, traction control, power steering,
or anything resembling an electronic safety net, despite the fact
that the car cost nearly $1 million at launch. (Or that most of
those features were standard on cars costing far less.) What you
did get was the fastest production car in history—231 mph—
and one of the least compromised road machines ever built.
None of that was by accident. From general layout to minor
design touches, the McLaren F1 was dictated by the will of one
remarkable engineer. And it came from a small, eminently
focused company at the height of its power. By 1993, McLaren
had won seven Formula 1 constructors’ championships and
landed wins everywhere from Can-Am to the Indy 500. Gordon
Murray, the F1’s chief designer, had come to McLaren after a
stint at Brabham, where he drew two title-winning Formula 1
cars. In Woking, he co-designed the McLaren that gave Ayrton
Senna his first F1 championship.
Neither Murray nor McLaren had ever built a road car, but the
company gave him carte blanche. He got whatever he wanted,
from an engine cover lined with real gold foil to that landmark
V-12. The latter was the work of BMW Motorsport’s Paul Rosche,
the genius behind the German company’s 1000-plus-hp,
championship-winning Formula 1 four-cylinder. Along with
a small team of engineers, Rosche built the F1’s engine in just
nine months, after McLaren partner Honda got cold feet.
The car weighed 2425 pounds dry. It came with a built-in
14.4k modem for sending diagnostic information to the factory,
at a time when most of America didn’t have an Internet connection.
McLaren famously flew mechanics around the world to
service it. Murray had never wanted to take the car racing, but
customer demand prompted the creation of the F1 GTR, essentially
a production F1 with a roll cage. FIA rules left the model
27 hp down on its roadgoing sister, but it won Le Mans anyway.
And pretty much everything else they threw at it.
The F1 was unveiled to the public 25 years ago, in May of 1992.
Astonishingly, every supercar since has been something of a
32
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

THE ORAL HISTORY | McLAREN F1
dilution. The Bugatti Veyron is faster but
more complicated and distant. Porsche’s
iconic Carrera GT is a decade newer but
slower to 60 mph and more diffcult to
drive. Even McLaren’s own 903-hp P1
hybrid, which just left production, is 14
mph slower and a third of a ton heavier.
The F1’s origins have been covered to
death, but we wanted to illuminate the
thing’s life past the factory gates. To
lift the veil and take a look at the living,
breathing car underneath. Because
above all, that’s what Murray wanted to
create—not the museum piece or investment
that his work has become.
We spoke with owners, racing drivers,
and various lights in the car’s orbit, and
we found a story that still holds lessons.
And a reminder that, while the world
may now be faster and smarter, a quarter
century later, there’s still only one F1.
LIVING WITH IT
JAY LENO (Owner): Well, I’ve had mine
almost 20 years. When the car came
out, there were so many other supercars
just coming out—Vector [W8], [Jaguar]
XJ220, Bugatti EB 110. The Jaguar
was the most expensive. Six-hundredthousand-dollar
range. And all of a
sudden, you had this car that was close
to a million dollars.
How much better could the milliondollar
one be? Is it really three or four
times better than a Lamborghini or Ferrari?
And of course it was, but nobody
knew it at the time.
CHARLES NEARBURG (Owner): If you
blindfolded somebody and put them in
it, they would be hard-pressed to tell
you it wasn’t made yesterday.
ROGER CHATFIELD (Composites technician,
McLaren): When the company was
that much smaller, they arranged for
the whole factory . . . every person could
have a run at one. For me, [McLaren
director] Creighton Brown was driving.
He said, “We’re going to start by demonstrating
its torque ability.” Basically,
he just put it in gear, didn’t touch the
throttle. The car started moving away.
Next gear, car moving away, still no
throttle. We’re just going up through the
gears with no throttle. It’s like, This is
bogus. This shouldn’t be working.
NEARBURG: It’s actually sprung quite
softly. Much more body roll than a
“modern” supercar. You realize Gordon
knew what he was doing. He built a
package that generates extraordinarily
high g’s, but it’s very comfy. He didn’t
have to rely on superstiff springs and
superbig roll bars to get it to work.
MARK GRAIN (Senior technician,
McLaren Cars/Motorsport): There was
a German customer, a businessman.
He lived in Cologne, commuted in the
car every day. He said, “Oh, I’ve got a
problem, this warning light. I’ve looked
in the manual, can’t find anything. Can
you send somebody out, see what it is?”
So one of the guys went. It turns out
it was the engine cover lifting slightly.
The warning light for the engine cover.
But the only time the car ever did it was
185, 190 mph. “It does it on the way to
work, and it does it on the way back.”
Every day.
LENO: It makes the greatest noise ever.
And there’s no flywheel—you turn the
key off, it stops right now. You don’t get
that half a second of rrr. The only analogy
I can make: One time I did a concert
with Paul Simon and Paul McCartney.
There wasn’t a guitar strum, a
string—the song ended right now.
NEARBURG: You can tell by the way
it responds. You just feel the lightness
immediately. It’s a joy to drive, a very
honest car. Sitting in the middle isn’t
disorienting, and the only thing that’s
complicated is paying tolls in a foreign
country. When you have half of Italy
behind you, standing on their horn,
when you’re trying to figure out how to
get the toll in the damn booth.
LENO: That’s the real key to the car:
It’s incredibly light. The nose does get a
little light at extremely high speed. It’s
not as planted as, like, a P1, but then,
it’s 20 years earlier. Being carbon fiber,
you have the occasional clunk—you hit
a road marker, you feel it ripple through
the chassis. You drive a new NSX, and
that’s like a solid billet. You realize the
car weighs the same as a Miata?
RAY BELLM (Racing driver): I have
a contract to [run the McLaren F1
Owners Club], because I went to Ron
[Dennis, McLaren’s then chairman] in
2011. I said, “Ron, these cars, they’re
all sitting there doing nothing. No one
uses them.” Anyone who has a car is a
member, just by the fact that they’ve got
a car, and we run tours and do probably
700 or 800 kilometers over three days.
But the result has been that, in 2011,
the cars were worth about $3 million,
and they’re now $15 million. Rich
people always want to do something
no one else can. So the entry ticket is a
McLaren F1.
HENRY WINKWORTH-SMITH
(McLaren Special Operations Heritage
Manager): There are more cars being
used now than when I started 10 years
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 33

THE ORAL HISTORY | McLAREN F1
ago. People have suddenly gone,
“Actually, I can’t get this experience in
anything else.” And because the values
have climbed, people haven’t been quite
so worried about increasing mileage.
LENO: It’s funny, because everybody
talks about no ABS, no stability control,
no traction control. Yeah, like an MG!
Or a Triumph from the Sixties. And it
will get away from you—you go 70 and
downshift into third and nail it, that
rear end’s gonna break loose, unless
there’s heat in those tires. It’s a bit like
a loaded gun—you have to know how to
handle it, all the time. Not like cars now.
CHATFIELD: [Passenger seats on]
either side of the airbox, driver in front.
It’s just like a wild dog barking at you,
every time he’s going through the gears.
LENO: The needle moves so quickly,
your eye can’t follow it. Because if you’re
looking at it, you’re already in jail.
FIXING IT
JOHN MEYER (Senior technician, BMW
of North America): It’s like any good
sports car: If you don’t drive it hard,
it’s not gonna like it. There were a lot of
guys who really thrashed their cars and
didn’t really have problems.
“It’s a bit like a loaded gun—you have to know
how to handle it, all the time.”
WINKWORTH-SMITH: Paul Rosche,
rest his soul, said, “This engine should
be designed, developed, like any other
BMW series engine. It should not need
an opening for 250,000 kilometers.”
LENO: Talk about getting something
right the first time! There are a number
of them that have [huge] miles.
I’ve never known anybody to have any
trouble with it.
BILL AUBERLEN (Factory racing
driver, BMW): The GTR had sequential
shifting, right? Every sequential I’ve
ever been in is pull to shift up. Gordon’s
idea was that you’re stronger when
seated, so the GTR was push to shift
up. Three in the morning at Le Mans,
you’re almost asleep in the car, and all
of a sudden—you shift the wrong way.
Luckily, the engine is bulletproof.
There are stories about where a water
hose fell off and they drove it all the way
[back to the pits]. It’s melting everything
around it, and it makes it.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: The race
engines were designed to do 9000
kilometers between big servicing. We
had one road engine that the customer
decided to send his car to a nontrained
servicing place. They used the wrong
oil—we found a lot of wear. It’d been
foaming up and not pumping around
the engine properly. And they tightened
up what they thought was a chain
tensioner. That put too much tension on
the timing-chain assembly—one of the
bolts loosened and started smashing up
and down underneath the pistons.
So we had that engine back. It went
back to BMW Motorsport, got stripped
and rebuilt, even re-Nikasil’d. And it’s a
good story, but that’s the only time I’ve
heard of it happening.
MATT FARAH (Journalist): My favorite
McLaren F1 story is from Ralph
[Lauren, a family friend]. About the
year 2000. One of his three F1s. The car
wasn’t running right, so he plugs it into
the wall. The car dials McLaren. Two
guys in tweed jackets come over from
England, they show up at his house.
They go, “Okay, give us the keys.” They
come back and go, “You’re not shifting
Bottom: The F1’s carbon tub, a world first for a
road car. Roll cage marks this as a GTR. Opposite:
At rest in McLaren’s Special Operations
shop. The car’s 600-hp, 7500-rpm BMW V-12
breathes through that duct on the roof.
34
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

THE ORAL HISTORY | McLAREN F1
high enough,” and fly back to England.
That was it, the whole problem. That’s
what owning a McLaren F1 is like.
LENO: You forget—there weren’t even
[smartphones] when this came out. It
just seemed so improbable.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: Until three
months ago, we were using those [original
1990s] laptops [for diagnostics].
Our technicians were being stopped in
airports and asked to prove that it was a
real laptop, because [security] thought
it was a bomb. They were like, “No one
uses those laptops anymore.”
MEYER: It runs on a DOS program!
WINKWORTH-SMITH: There was a
Jalopnik post, someone took a picture
of a laptop here. First off, our workshop
manager was furious, because there
was a car up in the background and
it didn’t look all smart and neat. But
that article was hilarious, because I
“The gold-foil engine cover is nicked from aerospace.
It is the lightest heat-effective material we can use in
that application. Everything was there for a reason.”
probably got 45 or 50 emails offering
me laptops. Ranged from, “I have one of
these laptops. I’m not using it. I would
like nothing more than the thought of
that laptop looking after a McLaren F1.
Please give me your address, and I will
ship it,” to some guy who was like, “Well,
if you haven’t got them, I’ve got one. I
want $20,000.”
LENO: We do our own servicing on the
car—as advanced as it was in the day,
it’s nothing compared to now. What’s
funniest is that the car comes with a
tool roll. The most beautiful tool set
you’ve ever seen. Titanium wrenches
that weigh mere ounces. The idea that,
if your McLaren breaks down on the
101, you’re going to get out the tool roll
and fix it.
MEYER: Because the cars are driven
very infrequently, servicing is by time.
Every nine months was a basic service.
Eighteen months was a major service.
Every five years, the fuel cell has to be
replaced.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: It’s an FIA-spec
bag tank, which is brilliant for crash
regulations, but . . .
MEYER: The whole back of the car
comes off.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: About 25 or 30
hours? It’s easy, but it takes a long time.
It’s not that everything is accessible. So
the fuel tank, it’s engine-out. Watertemperature
sensor, it’s engine-out.
But because you’ve taken the engine
out, you need to do a suspension setup.
And they’re hand-built; they’re not all
the same. One car might set up really
easy, and the other might be really
diffcult. To get all the ride heights and
cross weights and everything dialed in,
it could take a day. You just don’t know.
LENO: There are no parts. When you
break one, they will make you the part.
But there’s not a lot of off-the-shelf stuff.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: We’ve got very
few windscreens left, for instance. They
have this special coating between the
two laminates, which means you don’t
have wires in them, which gives you a
heated windscreen.
To be British, they’re jolly expensive.
And, you know, you could put a cheaper
GTR screen in, but the voltage is different,
you haven’t got your wiring, and it
hasn’t got the same blue tint. So we said,
Okay, the only way we could do it is to
invest in [ordering a complete glass set].
It’s hundreds of thousands of pounds.
But it’s important to do it, to keep these
cars on the roads.
Left: BMW noise laid bare. Opposite: The
V-12’s carbon airbox meets real gold foil—heat
insulation—and artfully arranged silencers.
36
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

LENO: When I first got it to the dealer
for service, they said, “Oh, replace the
wiper blade.” I said, “Well, I don’t drive
the car in the rain.” They said, “It’s part
of the service.” I said, “How much is the
wiper blade?” They said, “$1500.” I said,
“You know what, don’t replace the wiper
blade! I won’t take it out if it rains.”
You’re at the point now where anything
on the car . . . it’s a house.
MEYER: At one time, we had four in
the shop at once. [BMW], back in New
Jersey, was having a heart attack.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: I mean, insurance,
kill me. We have this limit of two
[in the shop at a time]. We had 14 in
here at one point. I got a big telling off
for insurance. I think the [extra] cost to
us was substantial.
LENO: It’s still a car. It’s still a 20thcentury
automobile in the sense that
you see where everything is. We broke
a shifter fork on it; we made a new one.
It’s just a shifter fork. It’s aluminum.
It’s not that unusual. That’s the funny
thing about it. All these cars have taken
on this mythical status, but they’re still
cars. More cleverly put together than
most, by a long shot, but it’s still a car.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: Whenever we
service a car, there will be two road
tests carried out. So we truck it to a
test track, and we’ll do a seven-page
test procedure, test every single thing
on the car. And that goes from pulling
the handbrake at 50 mph to see what
the retardation’s like, to full-throttle
accelerations, to really heavy braking
to see what the balance is like, to rating
the stereo performance at mid and high
volume on a scale of one to ten.
GRAIN: One of the F1 road cars was
on display at some event. The engine
cover, it’s all gold foil. We’d nicked it
from aerospace. [A bystander said,]
“You’re doing it just because it’s a shiny
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 37

color and it’s expensive, and it allows
you to bill more for the car.” And a
colleague replied, “It is the lightest
heat-effective material we can use in
that application.” Everything was there
for a reason.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: Over time, [the
foil] degrades. People touch it, they try
and clean it, it rubs off. That’s why we
replace it. It’s not actually that mental.
It’s a few thousand pounds.
LENO: It’s just so beautifully put
together, and so simply. It’s not
meant to be complicated, it’s just
different.
MAURIZIO ZAGARELLA (Technician,
McLaren): We were called flight doctors.
Anybody used to fly anywhere if there
were any issues.
NEARBURG: Pani Tsouris has driven
more miles and knows more about
these cars than anybody alive, with the
exception, I guess, of Gordon.
PANI TSOURIS (Traveling F1 technician,
McLaren Special Operations): I just came
back from the United States. A clutch in
Minnesota and a fuel-tank replacement
in Florida.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: Twenty-four/
Floor-hinged pedals are milled from solid billets
and centered perfectly before the driver. Gear
shifter to the driver’s right on the off-center console.
Gorgeous gauges dominated by huge tach.
seven, both of us. I switch my phone off
Christmas Day, my anniversary with
my girlfriend, and her birthday. Pani’s
test-driven cars at midnight.
TSOURIS: Nothing [I do] is an emergency,
in terms of fly out tomorrow.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: I think the
shortest trip—a guy in Europe got a flat
tire. Within an hour and a half, there
was a technician at Heathrow, with
a wheel in his luggage, flying to the
38
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

THE ORAL HISTORY | McLAREN F1
nearest city, who then got a taxi to this
car on the side of the road. Three and a
half hours later, he was there.
TSOURIS: [For jobs requiring] more
than two and a half weeks of work, it’s
in our best interests to bring the car
back. Or try to, at least.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: These days,
because of the value of the car, it’s
almost impossible to write one off.
A good example is—if you do a bit of
Googling, you’ll find out who I’m talking
about. His car came in, and he’d had
a fairly substantial shunt. The car was
in two halves. It had split. The car had
done brilliantly, because he’d hit it right
in the middle. The passenger [cell]
was absolutely perfect. We cut all the
damage out of the tub, x-rayed it, cracktested
it, and then, using all the original
body molds, the tooling, the layup
books, and also some of the original
staff that built these tubs back in the
day, we rebuilt it.
DANNY ENGLAND (Composites technician,
McLaren): We are, of course, the
only company in the world that is physically
capable of rebuilding F1s.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: And now that
car is driving around, as good as it
left the factory, even down to doing
torsional-rigidity tests. And to do that,
we had to measure it against another
F1. So we stripped two other cars down
to make sure it was gonna be the same.
PHIL HARDING (Development technician,
McLaren): It’s not like you can
go and pick another monocoque out
and build a new car. It’s cost-effective
to repair something worth 5 million
pounds, isn’t it?
RACING IT
BELLM: The project was born as a conversation
between myself and Ron Dennis.
I ordered a road car, chassis 046,
in 1993. I said to Ron—who I’ve known
for many years—“I’m going to race it.”
He said, “Oh, don’t do that, ’cause it will
cause me so many problems. If you want
to race the car, I’ll build you one for a
million pounds.”
In retrospect, I should have said
yes. I said, “Oh, I can’t afford a million
pounds for a race car.” He said, “Find
two other customers, and we’ll make
three.” I said, “This car will beat everything
out there.”
MARK ROBERTS (Designer, McLaren):
Gordon mentioned to me once that
he almost felt pressured into it. It was
never designed as a race car.
HARDING: I think the idea was, we’d
just do one to see how it goes. All we
did, basically, was the minimum to get
away with, to meet, FIA regulations.
Air jacks on it, roll cage in, bag tanks,
and a little bit of solder work.
ROBERTS: If we didn’t do it properly,
people would go out and do it anyway.
It was considered the right thing to do.
AUBERLEN: 1998, I drove a Longtail
at Le Mans. When you release that
speed-limiter button on hot tires, I
swear to God: I was better-looking,
I was taller, I felt better about myself.
It’s a car that has a spirit and a soul.
You’re going down the Mulsanne at
200 mph. You could see the wheels light
up from the carbon brakes, the flames
coming out the back.
BELLM: The first year, ’95, was just a
stripped-out road car. The steering
was so heavy, you could barely hold it
around corners. So the first thing we
did [was ask] for a new steering rack.
And to this day, the steering rack of the
GTR is infinitely superior to [that] of
the road car.
AUBERLEN: When it first came out, it
was at the top of the field, so you didn’t
have to drive 20 percent over the limit
all the time to try to keep up. I mean,
there were times when we were probably
30 seconds ahead of the field. You’re not
even racing at that point.
BELLM: When we first tested it, it
was quite a handful, because Gordon
Murray didn’t believe in rear anti-roll
bars. It had no rear anti-roll bar—he
J E A N-Y V E S RUSZNIEWSKI/GETTY IMAGES
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 39

THE ORAL HISTORY | McLAREN F1
L AT PHOTO G R A P H I C / C O U R T E S Y MCLAREN
Le Mans in 1995: Where a lightly
modified road F1 finished first.
thought you could control it all from
the front. And because you had so
much torque, we had to work quite
hard on getting decent traction. But
basically the engine was so far and
away better than everything else [we
raced]—F40s and Porsches, Venturis,
all sorts of rubbish. Only in ’97, when
Porsche and Mercedes woke up, did we
start to have what I would call naked
competition.
AUBERLEN: It’s always there. It’s a very
stiff, rigid carbon tub, and [the Longtail]
has reasonable downforce, so it’s a
very stiff car. You notice that right away.
It’s very consistent on the tires.
BELLM: It’s satisfyingly demanding if
you know what you’re doing. Frighteningly
demanding if you don’t know what
you’re doing. Which is why there have
been one or two accidents. In the wet—
people don’t realize this, but at Le Mans
in ’95, the car ran with zero downforce.
It actually had lift at speed.
AUBERLEN: I know so many people
that, once they get comfortable, they’re
like, [makes crashing noise]. It doesn’t
give you a lot of feedback. It’s great,
great, great, right up until biting you.
That window of the unknown—
it takes a while to get used to that.
ROBERTS: During ’95, ’96, and ’97, we
were producing monthly or fortnightly
updates for the cars. It was a typical
Formula 1 attitude. We were just trying
all the time to improve the car.
AUBERLEN: You gotta wait a minute for
the grip to come up on the tires. It will
not give it to you in a lap or two. And
once there, you sort of just flow with
the thing. There’s no sliding. With the
GT cars that we race now, you’re always
moving something around.
BELLM: I don’t want to upset Gordon,
’cause he’s a friend of mine, but I always
say it’s the most wonderful engine in a
compromised chassis. The engine was
sublime. It wasn’t designed as a race
car, so all the angles were wrong on the
suspension. You couldn’t get the car
low enough, and if it dropped too low, it
locked out. The ’96 car—which is why a
lot of us bought ’96 cars—they changed
some of the geometry, so we could get
better grip. But I think other than one
car, we all fitted rear anti-roll bars.
Gordon was absolutely shocked.
JAMIE LEWIS (Electrical engineer,
McLaren): It was a very small team.
The scale now is such that you have to
have business processes and systems,
so a lot of the time, you feel a little bit
removed from the core. It’s a much
bigger operation. You just can’t work
that way anymore.
GRAIN: I always remember looking at
the grand-prix team, and just thinking,
They’re a bunch of bastards, they are
. . . they do it right. There was always
an air of confidence tinged with a bit of
arrogance: “Even if we’re not absolutely
the best by winning races, in the garage,
we were bollocks. Everything will be in
place. Everything will be spot-on.”
LOOKING BACK
LEWIS: Normally, you start a company,
build a product. McLaren Automotive
exists today because of that car. It was
designed to build a company.
ROBERTS: None of us had any idea of
how legendary it was going to become.
ANDY WELLS (Parts manager, McLaren):
I didn’t actually appreciate it until now,
to tell you the truth. We won Le Mans
with pretty much a road car. It’s the biggest
thing I’ve ever achieved in my life.
40
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

THE ORAL HISTORY | McLAREN F1
“If you think about when it was designed and built,
everything on that thing was Formula 1.
They were not saving any money on anything at all.”
ENGLAND: A bunch of people, all from
the motor-racing industry, had no idea
about road cars. But that’s the bit that
made it fun and exciting.
BELLM: The P1, you can drive the rocks
off it, and you feel completely at home
and in control, because the grip levels
and the electronic-traction levels, and
the brake-steer help you a lot. But turn
it all off, it’s a bit like driving an old F1.
AUBERLEN: I probably drive [BMW
of North America’s exhibition F1 GTR]
three times a year. I take people for
rides, and it blows their minds. The
downforce on our modern-day GT cars
is way higher. When you’re skating
around low-downforce, it’s pinkies
up, very dainty on the steering wheel.
This car is still way faster in a straight
line—it will just destroy [new] cars.
And listening to that motor. I mean, the
restrictor’s right above your head.
LENO: Right now, it’s kind of like champagne.
It’s something you have once a
month or on special occasions.
MEYER: If you think about when it was
designed and built, everything on that
thing was Formula 1. They were not
saving any money on anything at all.
I loved it. I miss them terribly.
ROBERTS: Gordon said, “Just go and see
what everyone else is doing, and make
sure you do something significantly
better.” So I managed to get hold of an
F40 owner’s manual and a 959 Porsche
manual. . . . The whole ethos was
craftsmanship and that human element,
so I thought we should hand-draw the
manual. Pencil sketches and watercolor.
Nobody would ever be crazy enough to
sort of do that sort of thing again.
BELLM: I love the car and what it
stands for. It was a massive step
forward, basically the Ferrari 250 GTO
of the Nineties. We just don’t realize
how far technology has moved. The
gearbox, which was not the easiest.
The porpoising at speed, which meant
it steered itself. The car tracked a bit,
because of the lack of camber and
caster. Lots of little aspects that just
made the car, made you concentrate.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: They’re just
so . . . different to modern cars.
ROBERTS: We still refer back to them
almost on a daily basis. The purity in
the design. The package.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: If you look
at what other cars in the market are
doing—250 GTO at whatever they’re
worth these days, 50 [million dollars] or
whatever, the general thought is that the
F1 is the next one of those.
BELLM: In 2004, I bought probably
the cheapest-ever F1. I paid £300,000
on chassis 016R. I sold it for £650,000
and thought I had made a complete and
utter killing.
WINKWORTH-SMITH: These days,
13 to 15 million for a road car. Apart
from the car we own—GTR 01R, the
Le Mans winner, we’ve had some very
silly offers—a really impeccablehistory
race car would be 20, 22
million restored.
AMANDA MCLAREN (McLaren
ambassador, daughter of company
founder): They arranged for me to be
taken for a drive [in a roadgoing F1].
Down this residential road, all the
curtains are twitching. There was a
bulbous lorry in front of us . . . bits start
falling off . . . this guy starts sweating.
He starts telling me how much the
insurance is. More than my house was
worth at the time.
NEARBURG: I was told by the staff of
the Petersen [museum] that of all the
cars in their Precious Metal exhibit,
the F1 probably attracted the most
attention. And without a doubt among
anybody less than 40 years old. When
you drive it, it’s almost unnerving.
People either recognizing it, or not
immediately seeing the driver and
freaking out.
BELLM: It’s unbelievable. It’s just pure
adulation. People recognize it because
it’s the iconic car of the Nineties, the
first of the all-carbon, the real supercars
after the F40, which was a space frame
covered in bits of plastic.
LEWIS: I started in ’91 . . . probably
about 120 people in McLaren Cars. And
now it’s 3500. The scale of the operation
has changed so dramatically that it’s
almost incomparable. But there’s still
that sort of core DNA that exists, that
42
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

Ron kind of instilled in all of us. Attention
to detail and doing things right.
ROBERTS: Obsessive-compulsive
disorders. We all suffer from that.
And if you don’t, when you join the
company—you will. We’re lifers. It gets
under your skin.
LEWIS: That no-compromise thing.
ROBERTS: Remember, Gordon and the
original team were mostly race people.
They lived in that world already.
NEARBURG: He’s incredibly hardworking.
Never stops thinking, never
stops doodling, never stops pursuing his
passion for how to improve automotive
manufacturing. His whole new thing
that he’s got going on now—building
McLaren F1
(TESTED DECEMBER 2002)
price $1,000,000 (2002 est)
engine dohc 48-valve 6.0-liter v-12
peak output 627 hp @ 7400 rpm
479 lb-ft @ 4000 rpm
transmission 6-speed manual, rwd
l x w x h 168.8 x 71.6 x 44.9 in
weight 2425 lb (dry)
0–60 mph 3.4 sec
0–1/4-mile 11.6 sec @ 125.0 mph
top speed 231 mph (est)
trucks in a box for the third world that
can be assembled in a few hours with
common hand tools. He’s still got such a
fertile imagination.
ZAGARELLA: We were all looked after
by the business. Even our families. I
think that’s what made this company
great. I think it came from Ron and
Gordon, who were very much the same.
NEARBURG: One of the most hilarious
things is watching [Gordon] drive his
little Bugeye Sprite. He throws on this
little leather bucket helmet, and he
plops in that thing, and he goes ripping
around like he’s on the Isle of Man or
something. But he’s still a very intense,
focused, driven guy. My sense is that
he’s doing this stuff because he wants to
make a difference.
GRAIN: At heart, he was a racer, wasn’t
he? Still is.
NEARBURG: How often in this world
does one guy—one guy who is supremely
qualified and has all the resources that
he needs—how often does that guy get
to design the ultimate anything? ■
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 43

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THE FIRST DRIVE | 2018 McLAREN 720S
SUPERHERO
THE MOST SINISTER-LOOKING MCLAREN IN HISTORY IS SECRETLY A SWEETHEART.
BY CHRIS CHILTON | PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHARD PARDON & PATRICK GOSLING
46
JULY 2017

T H E F I R S T D R I V E
T’S LIKE AN ATHLETE WITH AN
incredible figure wearing a sack.”
That’s how McLaren design director
Frank Stephenson described the
MP4-12C (which had been designed
almost entirely before he arrived in
Woking) during a 2015 interview
with Road & Track.
In approaching its first
supercar since the F1 with a race team’s focus, McLaren had
made a crucial miscalculation. The 12C, when it debuted for
2012, lacked the one thing that you can’t put a number on: wow
factor. A Band-Aid rebranding, as the 650S, for 2015 couldn’t
fix that.
The 720S, the 650S’s successor, does not want for wow.
The 720S is as polarizing as the 12C was unimaginative, as
innovative as its ancestor was predictable. Take the headlights:
They cleverly, but controversially, borrow from the tuner world,
using their sockets as air intakes. Slim LED strips bridge the
chasm and provide illumination. You might not like how they
look, but you’ll definitely notice them.
Same with the rear quarter panels. Gone are the gaping
radiator ducts that convention says all mid-engine cars need
between the rear wheel and the door. Those ducts remain, but
are hidden behind the outer door skin. The uninterrupted form
dramatizes the long wheelbase, like the
extended swing arm on a drag motorcycle.
Striking.
The 720S is no less jarring from
beneath the bubble canopy. From the
driver’s seat, I can see the outer door
skins sitting proud of the waistline as I
power down the start/finish straight at
the Vallelunga race circuit near Rome.
I imagine for a moment that they’re the
side-mounted gas tanks on Alberto Ascari’s
Lancia D50 grand-prix racer. Vallelunga
was a dirt track when Ascari met
his maker, flipping a Ferrari 750 up the
road at Monza in 1955. I’ve driven here
a couple of times before, most recently
in an Audi RS3, and before that for the
launch of the original Lamborghini
Aventador. So, basically never in anything
that actually wanted to turn. Consider that remedied.
The 720S loves to turn. The steering is weightier than in the
650S, thanks in part to geometry changes that increase positive
caster. That only adds confidence as you nudge the wheel away
from center and process vital feedback from the tires.
And that’s real feel. McLaren tried purely electrically assisted
steering racks during development but couldn’t get any to
deliver the desired clarity. Instead, the 720 has an electrohydraulic
system that banishes the electric motor upstream where
it simply turns a hydraulic pump, a job that the engine would do
in old-school hydraulic power steering.
Even 15 years ago, no one would have believed that a car so
powerful could be so forgiving. Driving the 720 hard feels intuitive
from the first corner. You can sense the wheel lighten as
you brush the front tires’ limits, can tease the balance by massaging
the gas pedal.
Only a few weeks before this trip, I drove the Bugatti Chiron,
a car that weighs more than 4400 pounds and accelerates so
freakishly, it feels like your internal organs are trying to sieve
through the pores on your back. It almost convinces you, as do
many modern supercars, that gobs of power and clever, computer-controlled
differentials make curb weight irrelevant. The
720S, which weighs a claimed 3150 pounds, is a stark reminder
that old truths about lightness still hold. The car is agile in an
authentic way that comes only from a ruthless approach to
mass reduction.
That agility is augmented by a hydraulic roll-control system
that debuted on the MP4-12C. It interconnects the dampers
and makes anti-roll bars unnecessary. The hardware is essentially
the same, but 12 extra sensors allow the 720’s system to
react more quickly to situations. Conventional anti-roll bars
would weigh less, but then the car wouldn’t react to the dip at
Turn 1 or the banking at Turn 2 anywhere near as gracefully.
The 720S, with scoops in mysterious places
and unconventional door skins, is as wild as the
old MP4-12C was conservative.
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 49

Less effective is McLaren Variable Drift Control,
a stability-control-based system that lets you tailor
your slide by swiping a finger left or right across a
graphic on the nav screen. Not since the Mustang
II King Cobra’s graphics package has performance been so
oversold: This is more “slight oversteer” than “drift.” The idea
of helping novice drivers safely approach the 720S’s huge limits,
though, is sound.
Gadget fans will also appreciate the telemetry option that
shows sector and lap times for the circuit, plus a graph that
traces braking and acceleration. Later, in the pits, I compare
mine with chief test driver Chris Goodwin’s: His up-and-down
spikes mimic a graph of gas prices through the 1970s; mine are
like toilet-paper sales over the same period.
But caught up in the moment, in the act of actually driving, I
feel every bit as heroic as Goodwin. Taking the jink right after
the pits, my foot buried deep into the carpet, pulling the car
left again, then standing on the brake pedal with all my might,
I marvel at stability the MP4 and 650S lacked. Probably has
something to do with the wider rear spoiler hurling itself into
the slipstream in airbrake mode. Hot-lapping the 720S is an
absolute scream.
Twin switches govern
chassis and drivetrain
settings. The 720’s
drift control is mostly
a gimmick.
The only thing it can’t do is scream back. Behind
your head, mounted low in the aluminum rear
subframe, is an evolution of the twin-turbo V-8
that has, in various forms, powered every modern
McLaren, from the entry-level 540C to the halo-model P1.
Here, a longer stroke increases displacement from 3.8 liters in
the 650S to 4.0 liters.
In terms of performance, it’s a monster. Power increases to
710 hp, from 641 hp in the 650S. Even the P1 only made 727 hp
before you factor in its electric motor—and that car cost four
times as much. The engine spins to 8100 rpm in first gear and
to 8200 in successive gears and feels noticeably less laggy than
earlier iterations thanks to new twin-scroll turbochargers. The
car scoots to 60 mph in a factory-measured 2.8 seconds. This is
a supercar with hypercar levels of go.
But push the start button, and there’s no flamboyant fanfare.
Squeeze the gas pedal, and there are no sonic fireworks to transport
you back to that day in your childhood when you heard
a proper supercar on song for the first time. McLaren tells us
the optional sport exhaust sounds more akin to the old limitededition
675LT, and that it is about 30 percent louder than the
base unit. (McLaren wouldn’t be McLaren if it didn’t assign
50
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

T H E F I R S T D R I V E
The 720S is agile in an authentic way that comes only
from a ruthless approach to mass reduction.
numerical values to everything.) The 720S does, indeed, sound
infinitely better with the sport pipes. Of course, the lack of volume
in the standard car, disappointing on a test-drive, is likely
to win you over long term. But aren’t supercars purchased solely
to administer shots of adrenaline in 10-minute doses?
McLaren clearly believes otherwise. Practicality is quite literally
baked into the carbon-fiber chassis. Whereas the 12C’s
tub had no roof structure, the 720S incorporates a central roof
bar. That provides extra rigidity, but the bracing up top also
allowed McLaren’s engineers to lower the sills,
easing access to the cabin. Instead of falling
butt first into the driver’s seat, as is the norm
with mid-engine supercars, you can climb
aboard the 720S with some dignity. You can
actually get out of the thing in a tight parking
garage, too, as the dihedral doors require less
space to swing open than their predecessors.
Outward vision is excellent, both forward,
past the A-pillars with their optional exposed
carbon weave (a nice touch) and, more surprisingly,
at the back.
There’s even room for luggage. McLaren
2018 McLaren 720S
price $288,845
engine dohc 32-valve
twin-turbo 4.0-liter v-8
peak output
710 hp @ 7000 rpm
568 lb-ft @ 5500–6500 rpm
transmission
7-speed automatic, rwd
l x w x h 178.9 x 76.0 x 47.1 in
weight 3150 lb
0–60 mph 2.8 sec
top speed 212 mph
on sale now
dropped the engine’s intake plenums, carving out a 7.4-cubicfoot
package shelf behind the rear seats, although it’d be more
useful if the glass above it opened as in the 570GT. Factor in
the generous 5.3 cubic feet of space in the nose, which swallowed
two rolling bags full of camera gear, and you’re looking at
a supercar that thinks it’s a GT.
It rides like one, too, even though Italy’s roads are as broken
and uneven as Germany’s are smooth, and McLaren’s suggested
route for our test drive was particularly brave.
The extra steering weight is more noticeable
in road driving than on track. So is the
reduction in turbo lag as I swat away irritating
little Fiats with squirts of my right foot. The
carbon-ceramic brakes need a strong push—
great for meting out the exact amount of whoa
you want, but occasionally unnerving at traffic
lights, because what feels like a high pedal
effort isn’t enough to hold the car stationary.
If you can live with that—and with those
funky-looking lights—there’s very little not to
like about the first of McLaren’s second wave
of supercars. ■
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 51

SORRY. NOT SORRY.
O F F I C I A L L Y B A N N E D B Y T H E N H R A
Dodge is a registered trademark of FCA US LLC.

THEN & NOW | BMW | JAGUAR | PORSCHE
CROSSING OVER
THREE LEGENDARY MARQUES, SYNONYMOUS WITH RACING GLORY,
AND THE SUVS THAT NOW PAY THEIR BILLS. IN A CHANGED WORLD,
WE TOOK THE OLD NOISE OUT TO DANCE WITH THE NEW.
BY SAM SMITH | PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHARD PARDON
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JULY 2017

T H E N & N O W
WHEN IT COMES TO CARS, RACING DEFINED THE 20TH CENTURY.
The sport laid out the state of the art, pushed us and the
machine beyond what we thought possible.
To celebrate this magazine’s 70th anniversary, we chose
three pivotal decades in both R&T history and motorsport—
the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We selected three manufacturers
that made their bones racing in those eras, and whose balance
sheets are now largely dependent on a vehicle unlike any purebred
track car: the heavy, thirsty, workaday SUV.
We chose a vintage race car from each, plus three SUVs in
modern templates: big bruiser (BMW X5 M), mid-size luxury
(Jaguar F-Pace S), and pocket performance (Porsche Macan
GTS). Finally, we took the whole lineup to the track: Spring
Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Pahrump, Nevada.
The vintage cars were a reminder of how this business works.
How it operates on an odd mix of fashion and science; how racing
was once the most effective way to market a new car but is
now almost an afterthought; how the industry evolves based
on what customers believe to matter. The point wasn’t so much
a hardware comparison as a look at ideology—how the idea of
a fast car, and what it asks of us, has changed.
JAGUAR | 1954 D-TYPE & 2017 F-PACE S
There are a hundred things worth knowing about the Jaguar
D-type, but the most evocative piece of trivia has nothing to do
with the car itself and everything to do with its people. In 1953,
Jaguar notched its second win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The
factory sent a telegram to Queen Elizabeth II. To wit:
“The Jaguar team humbly present their loyal duty to Her
Majesty and wish to advise her that in her Coronation year
they have won for Britain the world’s greatest international car
race at Le Mans, France, yesterday. Signed, Jaguar, Coventry.”
A telegram to the queen: Because this was 1950s Britain, and
motor racing was front-page news. Also because Jaguar folk
were generally mannered people. They wore white coveralls
56
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

and ties at racetracks and built cars specifically for
a 24-hour race in France, where men tore around
at triple digits, no seatbelts, on closed public roads.
And for a time, their company was viewed in the
same light as Ferrari: a maker of exotic, staggeringly beautiful
sports cars among the best in the world.
That 1953 win came with a car called the C-type. It was a
worked-over version of Jaguar’s XK120 sports car, wearing a lowdrag
aluminum body (the “C” represented XK120C, for Competition).
Jaguar first went to Le Mans in 1950, with a 120, finishing
12th overall. A C-type won the next year. The world noticed. Jaguar
had built its first sports car less than 20 years before.
The D-type followed. From 1954 to 1956, 87 examples were
produced. The car looked like a happy, cat-faced UFO; it won
Le Mans in 1955, 1956, and 1957; and it would crank to 190 mph
at a time when most British sedans were lucky to hit 70. The D
used guts like those of the C—twin-cam straight-six, independent
front suspension, four-speed gearbox, live rear axle—but
Because the transport for
one’s D-type should also
be an aircraft-inspired,
riveted-aluminum
piece of period art.
also an ingenious riveted-aluminum unibody. The
car ended up more than 200 pounds lighter than
the C-type, and years later, when Jaguar’s own
E-type used similar construction, the arrangement
was still seen as revolutionary. (Not for nothing did World War
II leave a bunch of former aircraft engineers kicking around
England. They gave the country’s racing industry a leg up that
it retains to this day.)
From 1952 to 1985, Jaguar’s chief test driver was a man named
Norman Dewis. I know a D-type will do 190 mph because he told
me once, in an interview. He went that fast, he said, at Le Mans
in 1955, in the middle of the night.
“It was fine,” he said, shrugging. “The car liked it.”
My mouth gaped. Which is also what happened when our test
D-type, a 1954, rolled out of its transporter in Pahrump.
A D-type’s nose opens as one piece. It is an orgasm of compound
curves, and the engine it covers is a masterpiece, an
aluminum-head stunner with three giant Weber carburetors.
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 57

The 3.8-liter engine in our test car began life in Jaguar’s experimental
department; it was dynoed at 297 hp in period, nearly
50 hp more than a production D-type. The same basic design
was used in the E-type and every XJ6 until 1987.
It lit off with a throaty, crackling snarl. The owner told me
to shift at 5000 rpm. “But it doesn’t really matter,” he said,
because “you don’t always need to rev it.”
Good race cars always feel a little like small airplanes, but
I’ve never met one that so obviously referenced a runway. The
Jag’s flanks are glassy save a smattering of rivets. The body
tucks around the tires like the wheel pants on a Thirties Lockheed.
The engine pumps out torque the same way fire hydrants
spew water. And like an experimental airplane, it is a mesmerizing
blend of old function and new art. The chronometric tach
and speedometer, each larger than my palm, have clockwork
needles that stutter-step across the dials. Or take the D-type’s
power-assisted disc brakes: an evolution of those found on the
C-type, the first competition use of the technology. The system
was designed to use just one set of pads over 24 hours, assist
coming from a gearbox-driven pump that pressurizes brake
fluid. (The Jag carries more than a gallon of the stuff in total.)
The brakes are incredible, and an apt metaphor for the whole
car—the D slows almost like a modern vehicle. But it also
reeks of early days: The design and huge assist mean that all
four wheels can be locked at 80 mph by
simply laying your foot on the pedal. The
difference between a full-race stop and
no brake at all is little more than heavy
Feline evolution: The
190-mph, Le Mans–
bred Jaguar D-type,
and a particularly
good-looking SUV.
breathing. It was disarming on the first lap and wonderfully
relaxing by the third. As was the absurdly long throttle (flat-out
meant overextending my ankle, but also wheelspin you could
dab away with a toe flex). Or the one-man plastic windshield
(wind tamed, intake honk funneled up your nose).
Combine all that with ferocious stability at speed and a gearbox
slower than a day calendar, and you end up with shifts that
feel like achievements, as if you’ve moved on to a new chapter in
your life. (“Third gear? That was yesterday. Today I am a man,
in fourth.”) Nor do you drive the car with force. It wants aggressive,
creamy finesse and straight arms. You ramp your inputs
gently, so the chassis and skinny tires don’t fight you. And when
it slides, the rear wheels break first. Accompanied by that thunder-blat
six and an air of elegant violence.
This is the drug that helped sell the world on one of the greatest
marques in history. It’s also why people put up with decades
of unreliable Jaguar road cars with resale like an old sandwich:
I would own a million broken old heaps just to get a hint of a
D-type’s romance. The whiff of blitzing around France in the
1950s, listening to that Picasso of an engine snarl itself silly,
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T H E N & N O W
knowing that racing is dangerous, but not caring, because we
were moments past a world war in which death incinerated
much of Europe.
We are now 60 years from Jaguar’s last production-based Le
Mans win, which means public knowledge of that accomplishment
can’t be taken for granted. The F-Pace we brought to this
test had a few qualities in common with the D—a propensity
for sliding all four tires at once, surprisingly soft springs, good
compliance, linear and quiet steering—and around Spring
Mountain’s technical, 2.2-mile course, it was slightly quicker
This is the drug that helped sell the world on
one of the greatest marques in history. It’s also
why people put up with decades of unreliable
Jaguar road cars with resale like an old
sandwich: I would own a million broken old
heaps just to get a hint of a D-type’s romance.
than its older relative. There is a family resemblance, if you
squint. Even so, driving the SUV after the D seemed an unfair
tangent, a lyric poem with the nouns missing.
Perhaps because the world is now different, and less hospitable
to poetry. Jaguar is currently owned by Tata Motors, a company
from India, a former English colony. Aside from backing
a Formula E team, Jaguar no longer competes in motorsport
and is mostly focused on staying relevant and profitable after
decades of mismanagement. In the modern climate, that means
building a crossover, no matter how that lines up with history.
Which, it helps to remember, doesn’t always make sense.
When the last D-type was built, the model was nearly obsolete.
At the end of production, 25 examples remained unsold. In retrospect,
the idea of something so magical becoming old hat is a
little hard to take.
Thankfully, certain people understood.
In 1956, Jaguar’s founder, William Lyons,
was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Sixtyone
years later, that title seems appropriate.
And, when you stare into the fenders of
a D-type, nowhere near enough.
successful sports-car maker. The gazillion race wins, the livewire
steering, the crazy traction. The engine’s baroowww gruffhowl,
which sticks in your head for weeks. Or even just those
friendly front fenders, jutting out like a couple of bowsprits.
The 911 S we sourced for this test has been a race car since
new. In February of 1967, its first owner, Jack Ryan, used it to
win the 2.0-liter-and-under GT class at the 24 Hours of Daytona.
Ryan and his co-driver finished ninth overall, behind
three Ferraris, two Porsche prototypes, and three Ford GT40s.
(If you want to lose your mind, dig up the entry list. F1 legends
from Mario Andretti to Bruce McLaren, and Car
and Driver editor Brock Yates.) Tellingly, 38 of
the 60 cars that started the race did not finish.
Racing in the Sixties, as now, was a mix of luck
and hard work, but the cars were exponentially
more fragile.
And chiefly, the sport was simpler. In period
images, Ryan’s car looks almost stock. At Daytona,
it ran steel wheels and fender gaps that
could swallow a baseball. The car represents a
time when privateers could show up at a major
international road race and gun for the front in
lightly modified production cars, most of which were not laid
out with competition in mind.
As racing evolved, however, the science of motorsport began
to displace the art. From tires that sacrificed slip-angle tolerance
in exchange for grip, to suspensions that controlled toe
and camber better, everything grew more focused and less
compromised. The upside was drivers who stopped dying in
large numbers, and racing that became astonishingly close.
The downside is the general absence of dramatic flaws—you
rarely see new cars entering 100-mph corners ass-first because
their suspensions and tires essentially demand it. When a 2017
911 RSR is visibly sliding around Daytona, something has gone
wrong. When a ’67 S moves in a corner, it’s because the guy in
the cockpit has a pulse.
PORSCHE | 1967 911 S
& 2017 MACAN GTS
In 1963, Porsche introduced a new rearengine
sports car. Four years after that, it
released an angrier version of the same car.
In 1967, the production 911 S weighed 2365
pounds and made 180 hp from a 2.0-liter,
6800-rpm, carbureted, air-cooled flat-six.
But numbers rarely tell the whole story, so
I found myself strapping into a Polo Red
1967 911 S and thinking about everything
that makes a 911 special: the underdog family
company that became the world’s most
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 59

T H E N & N O W
Pulling out of the pits in our test car, I fell to pieces. Nothing
moves like a 1960s 911, and nothing sounds like a 2.0-liter
Porsche six. The teacup pistons and short stroke help it yawp
around the tach in tenorous barks. You stare down that hood,
that famously central tach framed by a handful of auxiliary
gauges. The pedals hinge up from the floor, and the A-pillar is
almost in your face, because the dash is only a few inches deep.
The synchros in the close-ratio five-speed, a Porsche design,
famously feel like rubber. They make every shift a unique
Old 911s have a lot of rules. But if you solve the
puzzle, the car leads with its hips, and you paint it
through the landscape in smeary little drifts.
combination of quick and slow, a precise fling that has to land
somewhere between smooth enough to not hurt the gearbox
and fast enough to be useful.
Old 911s have a lot of rules like that. Le Mans winner Hurley
Haywood once said that everything in a rear-engine Porsche
comes down to how you come off the brake, and so it is here. If
you don’t carefully bend the car into a corner, pinning the nose
with the middle pedal, it bobs and sniffs, burning speed by either
sliding the front tires or just kind of gliding
around tentatively. But if you solve the
puzzle, the car leads with its hips, and you
paint it through the landscape in smeary
In 1967, this 911 S
won its class at the
Daytona 24. It would
not be the last time a
911 did well there.
little drifts. The taillights move when you lift your right foot,
faster than a slew but slower than a snap. And the huge traction
means it’s always fixable, at least in part, with throttle.
Which hints at the greatness of any old 911: The car begs you to
rail on it. All 911s carry a lot of weight out back, but the suspension
geometry on early cars is less than ideal,
even by period standards, so they seem happiest
castering around. After 1968, Porsche gave
the 911 another 2.3 inches of wheelbase, to aid
high-speed stability. The change worked, but a
pre-’69 911 is a tame hummingbird—friendly
and compliant, never still.
It’s easy to understand why the world fell in love, and also
why some people hate it.
Our 911 ran a 1:52.46 around Spring Mountain, almost three
seconds faster than the 360-hp, nearly 4500-pound Macan
GTS we brought. Discount our test 911’s modern-spec race
tires and you’re left with something like parity, which is crazy.
More so when you consider how little the two machines have
in common, save a general sense of precision and abuseability.
MATT TIERNEY (2)
60
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

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T H E N & N O W
The GTS has nice, linear steering, but the 911’s wheel
is a revelation, perpetually abuzz with information.
The air-cooled car needs you to learn its language,
where the GTS just wants to go faster, wants more curbs, more
throttle, to spit torque where the steering is pointed, vectoring
into magically transparent slides. As on the 911, the brakes seem
unkillable. There is one available transmission, a seven-speed
twin-clutch automatic, and like the rest of the car, it works best
when you don’t think too much about its actions or try to outsmart
it. The new car asks as little of you as the old one demands
that you abide its rules.
A Macan is a fine device, probably the best-engineered
machine in its class, and its profit margin likely helps Porsche
continue to build sports cars. But history tends to forget fine.
Fine doesn’t ring with a sense of purpose that keeps people
coming back for half a century. Just as a 0–60 time isn’t the
same as a story you know by heart, a car that leads with its hips,
or a noise that won’t leave your head.
BMW | 1972 3.0 CSL & 2017 X5 M
I met Brian Redman last year. We were at the New York auto
show, standing next to the 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL that he and
Allan Moffat drove to a win at the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1975.
The 911 S and Macan
tango at sunset.
Opposite: The CSL.
He was 79, dressed dapperly, a warm smile. The car
seemed little more than fiberglass and air. I asked
him what it was like. He thought for a moment.
“Flexy,” he finally said.
I glanced at the roll cage, which appeared insubstantial, as
cages are not supposed to. Metal toothpicks under even thinner
pillars. Redman spoke again, his English burr a bit softer.
“Oh, but it was very nice. And a wunnderful noise.”
The 3.0 CSL was built by a company whose middle name
is literally Motor. Noise is what these people do—responsive,
silky, almost unburstable engines. The Bavarian Motor Works
was founded in 1916 but didn’t hit its stride until the mid-Sixties,
when it began a 30-year run of success in both touring-car
racing and the sport-sedan market.
That glory is rooted in one engine. In 1962, still reeling from
World War II, BMW released the 1500 four-door. That car’s
80-hp, 1.5-liter, overhead-cam four-cylinder used an overengineered
iron block and a stout aluminum head. Variations
found their way into everything from Brabham F1 cars to the
championship-winning, first-generation M3. With two cylinders
added, that four became the M30 straight-six, powering,
among other things, the Karmann-bodied CS coupe. With a
twin-cam head, the M30’s block lived in the M1 supercar, the
first-generation M6, and the first two generations of M5.
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This represents midcentury automotive engineering in a
nutshell: Logical changes to chase low-hanging fruit (at least
compared with today’s cars), big gains with every step, a visible
tech transfer from racing to
road, and chiefly, engineering
advances understandable by
ordinary people. A five-year-old
could look under the hood of a
roadgoing CS and the Sebring-winning 3.0 CSL and know that
the two are brothers. One more reason why, for decades, racing
helped sell cars.
And why BMW took to the track. With outputs ranging from
180 to 203 hp, the 1972–1975 3.0 CSL, for Coupe Sport Light,
was the company’s first big-league modern icon, sold to the public
in order to legalize certain modifications on CSL race cars.
This meant touches like aluminum body panels to save weight,
plexiglass windows on early examples, a monster fiberglass
wing, and a roof spoiler. The cars went to Le Mans, Sebring, the
Nürburgring, and Daytona, were driven by legends like Niki
Lauda and Hans Stuck. The CSLs’ looks earned them the nickname
“Batmobiles.”
Our test car was the first CSL to try to enter an FIA race. In
1972, while in private hands, it went to the Dutch Paasraces
and was turned away, because BMW had yet to homologate the
model. It later won the 1975 Dutch touring-car championship,
in the Levi’s livery seen here. Like many racing CSLs, it sports
gargantuan fiberglass flares, a fuel-injected, 3.5-liter M30
The CSL’s pipes were so loud, my 32-decibel earplugs
couldn’t cut the pain. I should have taken them out anyway.
making more than 400 hp, and vintage-style slicks the size of
kettle drums. Plus a close-ratio five-speed and a pair of straight
pipes so loud, my 32-decibel earplugs couldn’t keep the engine’s
wail from turning into pain.
I should have taken them out anyway.
What do you get from a legendary engine maker in the prime
of a golden era? A sound like the trumpets of hell, for one thing.
At 4500 rpm, it was a loud, pissy, off-kilter snort. At 6500, it
was fully on cam, howling the kind of skin-tingling yell you
used to find in F1, just deeper and with more mating animal.
You sit aft in a CSL, the dash a million miles away, windows
everywhere. The car feels unnecessarily large, because it
wasn’t built to meet government regulations regarding driver
placement or rollover crush, because those didn’t exist at the
time. The CS was created to make a wispy design statement,
and that meant a roof like a flowing cape.
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 63

The package works shockingly well. Next to the
911 and the D-type, the BMW feels like a normal car:
front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, and you might even
kid yourself into thinking that the CSL is modern,
because it requires no special instructions. It turns in hyperquickly
but then must be gently muscled over an apex. The springs
and dampers are soft and paired to fat tire sidewalls, but the car
isn’t reluctant to point. You can’t brake as deeply as in the 911,
but the pedal is consistent. The engine-driven mechanical fuel
injection (no computer, just a couple of pumps) is flawlessly flexible.
Slides are big, fast-hand dabs. It’s like the world’s screamiest
couch, comfortable for hours.
The CSL is faster than the X5 M. Of course it is. The slicks
and weight and focus let the race car carry more speed in
corners, help it brake better and point more aggressively.
Astonishingly, the 5299-pound X5 isn’t far off. The engine is
a relatively lag-free, 4.4-liter, 567-hp, twin-turbo V-8, but the
power isn’t as impressive as how the rig uses it.
The X5’s platform is the oldest of our three SUVs, and it does
things midcorner that the F-Pace and Macan seem to have
evolved beyond—a pause on-throttle, for example, as the active
differentials figure out where to send torque, to trim understeer.
It is also goofy as hell, in a good way. Pair suspension travel
with big mass and grunt, you get a machine that doesn’t care if
BMW’s specialty was
and still is engines.
The CSL’s 3.5-liter
straight-six makes
more than 400 hp.
you hammer over curbs with two wheels in the air,
that doesn’t slow down much when tires find dirt.
The body motions are hysterical, just big, controlled
whomping. As with the 911, it took patience to keep
the X5’s fun habits from upsetting a fast lap.
All this prompts questions: Is it nuts that we can now discuss
two-ton übertrucks in the same way we talk about purpose-built
race cars? SUVs aren’t allowed at most track days
and there’s nowhere to race them, so why are the good ones
engineered to be so happy under abuse? Should we applaud this
sort of thing, boo it, or just not care, so long as we get Jaguar
F-types, new 911s, and BMW’s M4 GTS?
If I’m honest, I don’t know. Just as I don’t really know what an
X5 M has in common with a 3.0 CSL. This was the most disparate
pair in our group, and the more I drove either car, the more
I went down rabbit holes of philosophy. I don’t want a trackable
SUV that weighs as much as a house, but I know people who do,
and they’re not idiots. I also know a lot of people who say these
crossovers represent a selling-out on the part of their makers,
and they’re not wrong, either. Finally, I know a handful of folks
who own an M4 GTS or a 911 GT3 or something similar, plus
a hot SUV, because they need a fun family vehicle for everyday
use, and fast wagons are getting harder to come by, so why not?
There’s logic in each approach. The hope lies in the fact that
64
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TRACK NOTES & LAP TIMES
SPRING MOUNTAIN MOTORSPORTS RANCH | VILLENEUVE COURSE A
PARUMPH, NV | 2.2 MILES | 13 TURNS
T H E N & N O W
2017 BMW X5 M
A. Turn 1 is long, a good indicator of
balance. 911 is fastest here, at 78.6 mph,
thanks largely to lots of tire for its weight.
CSL nips at its heels, around 1 mph slower.
D-type, X5 M, Macan, and F-Pace see 70–71
mph. Save the X5, the SUVs slide all wheels
evenly here—the BMW, always shuffing
torque, never settles down.
B. Turns 5, 6, and 7 create a complex section
with minor elevation and camber change.
911 is the most fun here, dancing constantly.
Amazingly, despite weight and balance
penalties, all three SUVs shuttle power around
well enough to rotate here and not lose much
time to the race cars.
C. D-type is second-fastest through Turn 10,
at 43.9 mph, yawing, to CSL’s more stable
47.1. Credit the Jaguar’s 1900-pound weight,
its broad torque, and a corner entry that
favors the car’s live axle.
D. Back straight: Brute grunt and traction
off Turn 10 mean X5 M is fastest before
braking—115.2 mph—despite having the
aero drag of a small building.
these machines exist at all. That someone, somewhere, opted to
not make each a mindless transport pod or a marketing exercise
that withers over an apex.
As the sun set, my eyes kept finding the vintage iron. I’ve
enjoyed the shapes of these cars all my life—in books, at the
track, in museums—but something at Spring Mountain made
them appear different. Race cars from these eras have climbed
in value over the past decade, to the point where owners who
track them are the exception, not the rule. In the waning light,
our three test cars seemed oddly ethereal, as if they might disappear
if looked at too long.
I briefly wondered if their creators appreciate how special
they are—the uniqueness of the moment that allowed their
achievements to exist. It’s cliché, but I was reminded of flowers
in springtime, and how they always seem brighter and more
colorful in memory.
Maybe that’s not such a terrible analogy. On a long enough
timeline, the same fate comes to everything we create. Especially
race cars, especially these. How lucky we were to have
them in the first place. ■
t4
t8
t7
turn 1
start/finish
1:47.733 sec BMW 3.0 CSL .................peak speed 112.4 mph.....screamy couch.
1:52.460 sec Porsche 911 S ...................peak speed 103.8 mph.....old game, old rules.
1:53.440 sec BMW X5 M .......................peak speed 115.2 mph.....the bruiser.
1:55.290 sec Porsche Macan GTS...peak speed 107.9 mph .....stuttgart tech prowess.
1:59.787 sec Jaguar F-Pace S..............peak speed 103.3 mph.....modern lady.
2:02.966 sec Jaguar D-type.................peak speed 104.6 mph .....grande dame of blat.
t5
t9
t6
t2
t13
t3
t12
t10
t11
base price/as tested
$99,795/$109,925
engine dohc 32-valve
twin-turbo 4.4-liter v-8
peak output
567 hp @ 6000–6500 rpm
553 lb-ft @ 2200–5000 rpm
transmission
8-speed automatic, awd
l x w x h 192.7 x 78.1 x 67.6 in
weight 5299 lb
0–60 mph 3.9 sec
0–¼-mile 12.2 sec @ 112.9 mph
top speed 156 mph
roadholding 0.96 g
2017 Jaguar F-Pace S
base price/as tested
$58,695/$71,468
engine dohc 24-valve
supercharged 3.0-liter v-6
peak output 380 hp @ 6500 rpm
332 lb-ft @ 4500 rpm
transmission
8-speed automatic, awd
l x w x h 186.3 x 76.2 x 65.0 in
weight 4421 lb
0–60 mph 5.3 sec
0–¼-mile 13.9 sec @ 100.7 mph
top speed 155 mph
roadholding 0.86 g
2017 Porsche Macan GTS
base price/as tested
$68,250/$77,255
engine dohc 24-valve
twin-turbo 3.0-liter v-6
peak output 360 hp @ 6000 rpm
369 lb-ft @ 1650–4000 rpm
transmission 7-speed
dual-clutch automatic, awd
l x w x h 184.7 x 76.1 x 63.0 in
weight 4492 lb
0–60 mph 4.4 sec
0–¼-mile 13.0 sec @ 103.6 mph
top speed 159 mph
roadholding 0.88 g
(ROAD & TRACK TESTED)
Special thanks: Terry Larson, Alan Benjamin, and Peter
Gleeson, for the kind loan of their vintage cars. And to Spring
Mountain Motorsports Ranch, for the use of its facility.
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 65

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DRIVING WITH | ALOIS RUF
ANGRY BIRD
A 211-MPH YELLOW, A 911 BY ANOTHER NAME, AND THE MAN WHO BEAT
THE WORLD FROM HIS GARAGE—WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM R&T.
BY SAM SMITH | PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHARD PARDON
72
JULY 2017

D R I V I N G W I T H
N 1987, ON A 15.5-MILE TEST OVAL in
Ehra-Lessien, Germany, a 469-hp
twin-turbo Porsche 911 went 211
mph. Only it wasn’t technically a
Porsche—it did not wear a Stuttgart
VIN and was known legally as a Ruf
CTR. The car had been
completed just one week
before, in a small garage in
the village of Pfaffenhausen, by a 37-year-old man born in the
house next door. And for a brief, shining moment, it was the
most potent production device this magazine had ever seen.
A moment we made happen. The July 1987 issue of R&T
holds a test called “The World’s Fastest Cars.” It was the second
running of an experiment we first tried in 1984. The ’87
version includes nine exotics, from an Isdera Imperator 108i to
a Lamborghini Countach 5000S Quattrovalvole. Porsche sent
no less than two examples of its range-topping 959, and a Ferrari
Testarossa was clocked at 185 mph. The slowest machine
went 176, in an era before computers were used to
keep supercars aerodynamically stable. Before the
invention of electronic stability control, when an
industry discovered how to calm a slide using silicon
Above: From 1987 to
1993, the world’s fastest
production car.
Opposite: Ruf in his
Pfaffenhausen offce.
and wheel-speed sensors. Before the 253-mph Bugatti Veyron
made the top-speed question almost irrelevant. When most
new sport sedans would only crack 150 mph if you dropped
them from space.
At 211 mph, the CTR topped everything. A heady achievement,
in heady company. Like all the cars in that test, Ruf’s
machine was driven by Phil Hill, the magazine’s de facto chief
tester. He was a graceful writer, a three-time Le Mans winner
who drove for everyone from Ferrari to Chaparral, and the first
American to land the Formula 1 drivers’ world championship.
Assisting him was Paul Frère, R&T’s European editor, another
Le Mans winner and a former Ferrari factory F1 driver who
had long been considered the dean of European automotive
journalists.
The story was penned by Peter Egan. In what can only be
taken as a measure of the test’s four-wheeled stock, Frère dryly
called the 959 “not all that exhilarating” at low rpm. (Lest you
think the man jaded, at one point in the Ruf, somewhere above
200 mph, he grinned manically and yelled to his passenger,
“This is faster than I’ve ever gone in my life!”) Egan’s
story noted that Ruf’s car had been nicknamed “Yellow
Bird,” because that’s what the thing looked like,
blistering across the landscape. The moniker stuck,
74
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

and Ruf proceeded to sell production versions under the name
CTR, for Group C Turbo Ruf. Shortly after, he put his friend
Stefan Roser in the car, on the Nürburgring, with a video camera.
The resulting tape featured a man in shirt sleeves and no
helmet, drifting one of the world’s most dangerous tracks. It
became one of the first viral car videos, circulated on countless
VHS bootlegs before enjoying a second life on YouTube.
Ruf Automobile GmbH is still in business. Alois Ruf turned
67 this year, and his 65-man firm is still registered with the
German government as a vehicle manufacturer, still earning its
own VINs through altered Porsche engineering. He still works
in the same garage that housed his business in 1987.
But none of Ruf’s creations have rung quite as many bells
as the Yellow Bird, which he still owns. There is no European
hot rod more evocative of the freedom of its time, no more epic
Road & Track test, and no machine as tied to this institution.
At this year’s Geneva auto show, to mark the CTR’s 30th anniversary,
Ruf released a carbon-bodied, 700-hp successor, again
in the shape of an air-cooled 911. In late 2016, we spent a day
at his shop, discussing Porsches, the changing tuning industry,
and the role of sports cars in an unstable world. Plus the undeniable
pull of a simple, straightforward machine that looks an
awful lot like a 911, but isn’t.
SAM SMITH: Two hundred and eleven miles per hour,
at a time when Porsche’s fastest production machine
was 13 mph slower, almost $100,000 more expensive,
and twice as complicated. I read somewhere
that you finished building the Bird less than a month before.
ALOIS RUF: About one week. [Laughs.] It was rainy. April,
lousy weather—just black sky. And the cars were running at
high speed, throwing water. It was crazy. After, we had lunch
in Pfaffenhausen, celebrating Phil Hill’s 60th birthday. Can you
believe it? He said, “It’s my birthday today.” I said, “Okay, then
happy birthday. Let’s have a party.”
SS: When your father built a garage, he probably didn’t
foresee world champions partying in your offce.
AR: Yeah, the company has been around since 1939. The
house [next door] is where I was born. My father said, “This is
going to be a big business. The entrance of Pfaffenhausen. This
is meant to be a car business.” In the diffcult years after World
War II, my father was very successful, because he was somebody
who could put something together out of nothing.
SS: It’s funny how fame works—a lot of people think the
company began with the Yellow Bird.
AR: There was a lot more before. I was born in 1950. When I
started to crawl, I was in my dad’s workshop. I wanted to know
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 75

D R I V I N G W I T H
1987 TEST: JOHN LAMM
everything. I fell into the waste-oil bucket. [Laughs.] One of
the greatest things that my father did—that impressed me most
as a child—was building his own tour bus. One day, he brings
in two big steel beams, and he says, “My boy,”—I was six years
old—“in one year, it’s going to be ready.”
SS: Something tells me he pulled it off.
AR: It was ready in one year! He built his own version of a
Mercedes 0321H. Used the bus, over 15 years, to take people
around. When he was driving it in 1963, a Porsche 356 passed
him, lost control, rolled two or three times. My dad stopped and
looked after [the driver]. He took him to the hospital, said, “I’ll
pick up your car, bring it to the garage. Just relax.” A week later,
he bought the [wrecked] car over the telephone. We fixed it, and
that was our first Porsche.
The whole family fell in love with this car. Then one day, we
[took it] to Munich, on a Sunday afternoon. I was 13, 14 years
old. A young man knocks at the side window. “I want to buy
your car. This is exactly the car I was looking for.”
“In the late Seventies, Stuttgart announced the final
call of the 911. I realized that there is a community
of people who want 911s, no matter what. I said,
‘Even if the community is small, I’ll stick with those
people, because I like the 911, too. I’m okay with that.’”
SS: Because he just wanted a Porsche?
AR: It was a very rare model. A Karmann Hardtop. He gave
us the money [right there]. He was driving another 356, and we
drove home in his car. He trusted us. Nobody knew the Rufs at
that time. My father said, “I have never seen anything like that.
These people with Porsche, they must be special people. Maybe
they’re crazy, but it’s good, you know?”
We built up an image as a specialist. Then in the late Seventies,
Stuttgart announced the final call of the 911. [A few] more
years, then it’s the end. I realized that there is a community of
people who want 911s, no matter what. I said, “Even if the community
is small, I’ll stick with those people,
because I like the 911, too. I’m okay with that.”
I wanted to continue making special models,
because Porsche had shrunk the [non-
Turbo] lineup down to the 911 SC. And the
answer from Porsche was, “Well, the 911, you
cannot do more with this car. This is the end.
You should switch to a 928.” (Porsche CEO
Peter Schutz saved the 911 from cancellation
in 1981 —Ed.)
SS: That thinking led you to build cars
like the 1978 Ruf SCR—a 3.2-liter engine in
a 3.0-liter Carrera. And, earlier, your own
five-speed gearboxes.
Opposite: 463 hp and two turbochargers at a time
when Porsche’s own 911 Turbo had just one. NACA
ducts in the fenders mark this car as the CTR
prototype—production cars did without, because
testing showed the ducts exhausted air instead of
inhaling it. Right: R&T’s legendary 1987 test: 337.8
km/h (209.9 mph). The car would later top 211 mph.
AR: Porsche said, “This car doesn’t need a five-speed. Such
strong torque. Four-speed is good enough. Most people who
can afford that expensive car, they don’t want to mess with a
fifth gear.” Complete reverse of what they do today and what
they did before.
SS: But it left an opportunity.
AR: The 911’s last call, that was an opportunity. When they
decided for a four-speed, we could go to a five. When they went
to a five, we went to a six. They always left a gap where we said,
“Okay, we can step in and do this.”
SS: So many people found your work in the Eighties,
through car magazines. They were the main funnel—the
information wasn’t available anywhere else.
AR: Like Auto Motor und Sport. You can always play with my
name, because it’s very short, and “Ruf” means “call” in German.
It also means “reputation.” So the headline was, “Porsches
guter Ruf.” Which means, “Porsche’s good reputation.”
SS: And that you’re either saving it or . . . something else.
AR: I was not very much liked at
Stuttgart for this. Then I made my
crusade to California and went to the
famous [Road & Track] Monrovia Avenue
building.
SS: You just walked in?
AR: [Motorsport editor] Joe Rusz
said, “Well, show me what you have
been doing.” I brought those magazines,
where [my car] was on the cover, and he
started talking to me. [Laughs.]
SS: And then you were cold-called by Paul Frère, one of
history’s coolest humans, for that first top-speed test.
AR: Frère says, “Mr. Ruf, we want to invite you for a Road
& Track story.” He put that together. I had no clue what this
event was. So I took our narrow-bodied turbo model, with a
five-speed gearbox. 369 hp. I asked Dunlop to prepare a set of
tires, and I thought, I cannot risk driving them on the autobahn.
I may have a puncture or something. So I put them in the
car—two tires on my passenger seat and two in the back. It was
totally packed. I drove up to Ehra-Lessien by myself!
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 77

D R I V I N G W I T H
SS: It was this nutty era where manufacturers were
actively pushing that barrier. Indy-car speeds with relatively
simple engineering.
AR: Ferrari didn’t want to come, so the vice president of the
German Ferrari owners club came with an outdated model. He
“A marketing director at Ferrari once told me,
‘I know, your car, it works. It’s a very good car.
But, next to a Ferrari, it looks like a frog.’”
says, “We have to represent Ferrari.” The Porsche factory sent a
930 Turbo. Aston Martin, they had bad luck—spark plugs that
were too hot, not good enough for a high-speed run. Holed a
piston. Nobody expected my car to be so fast.
Then we drove home, and Porsche was shocked.
SS: You were turning their cars into something else. The
way that company works—I can’t imagine they were thrilled.
AR: It was always comme ci, comme ça. Because there was
this jealousy, but at the same time, they could always say a
Porsche won. Better than a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. The car
that looks like a frog. A marketing director at Ferrari once told
me, “I know, your car, it works. It’s a very good car. But look,
next to a Ferrari, it looks like a frog.” [Laughs.] It’s the Beetle.
But then, we knew what “World’s Fastest Cars” meant—serious
driving, to the bone. If an engine lasts there, it lasts anywhere.
SS: The second World’s Fastest Cars round, in 1987—everything
I’ve read, it sounds more dramatic.
AR: Much more, because now everybody knew what the
event was about.
SS: There’s something with the yellow car that sticks
in people’s minds. That test and the infamous
Stefan Roser video, drifting the Ring in loafers
and white socks.
AR: That project was originally called 945R. That
idea came in 1980. I have sketches, design sketches,
for what this car was supposed to look like . . . a Ruf
supercar. “Nine” because it was based on the 911,
and “45” for 450 hp.
That was an exorbitant number at that time. We were thinking
how we could achieve that, twin turbocharging, because
the [single-turbo] 930 engines, they were already too aged
when they came out. But in 1982, I heard through the grapevine
that Porsche was going to make a supercar . . . the 959.
That scared me. I thought, Gosh . . . we have no chance. The
[Yellow Bird] engine was the leftover from that dream. The
five-speed gearbox was our design from 1981, so we put that
all into the regular shape of a 911, with the shaved rain gutters,
to make the car more distinctive and also better aerodynamically.
We kept the car as light and as simple as possible.
It was so great. I mean, Phil Hill was so excited. The guys,
they were competing with each other. Paul came in and he
had the number written on his palm—336.1 km/h. He was all
78
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

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D R I V I N G W I T H
excited. And then Phil got in the car and came back—339.8 km/h. [Laughs.]
It was a milestone.
SS: The industry has changed so much. So much that was possible for a
small company, that you just can’t do now.
AR: The cars were analog. Cars today are computers from A to Z. But we
were introducing, in our car, computer technology for engine management.
The system was from Bosch, the so-called 1.2, a
Ruf Highlights
Ruf Porsche 930
Turbo Used a Rufdesigned
five-speed
gearbox and a 369-
hp, 3.4-liter turbo
flat-six. Reached
186.2 mph in R&T’s
first World’s Fastest
Cars test, in 1984.
CTR The house
the Yellow Bird
built. Production
cars based on the
Bird blueprint. The
463-hp dyno rating
is widely believed
to be conservative.
(Porsche’s twinturbo
959, released
the same year,
made 444 hp.) Ruf
later said, “We use
very big horses in
Pfaffenhausen.”
CTR2 Built from
1997 to 1999. Based
on the 993-platform
911. A claimed top
speed of 213.4 mph.
CTR3 Clubsport
A tube-frame,
Porsche-based
supercar that looks
like a fever dream of
a Porsche Cayman.
Still in production.
2017 Ruf CTR
Unveiled at the 2017
Geneva auto show.
Pays visual tribute to
the Yellow Bird but
has a Ruf-designed,
carbon-fiber unibody.
Seven hundred
horsepower and a
claimed top speed of
224 mph.
racing unit also used in the 962.
SS: The Bird had the engine brain from a
Le Mans car?
AR: To get that kind of performance, you
needed a digital management system. And they
were not readily available like today. At the time,
Bosch was the one who had the perfect match for
our needs, and you were walking in and praying
that they would serve you. Thank God, they had
one guy who said, “Okay, I want to help you.” Normally,
they only talked to the big OEMs.
SS: And yet, even Porsche was a small company
until the Nineties. Has your relationship
with them evolved as they’ve grown?
AR: It has always been curves, up and down,
depending on who was running the company and
how open-minded they were. With the Yellow
Bird, the second high-speed run that we did at
Nardó, in 1988, Porsche actually sent an engineer
to collect data. They wanted to know cylinderhead
temperature and all these things. It was
great to work together with those men, because
we spoke the same language. But then you get a
new CEO, and everything’s over.
SS: The tuning business, in particular, is so
different from what it was.
AR: The things that used to be possible are just
not possible anymore. Everything is reduced to
electronics and laptops. But we aren’t trying to
be in that business anymore. We are a car manufacturer,
and since 1981, we put our own chassis
numbers on the cars. We are concentrating on
building our special models. People have come
back to the more . . . down-to-earth cars. Modern
cars have stability control and all kinds of stuff.
All of that is perfect, but it takes away some of
your personal engagement.
SS: Does a car have to be imperfect to be
interesting?
AR: It’s diffcult to say yes or no. But you want
to have this machine with its own life and tale.
Imagine a dog with no personality.
SS: Part of the industry is now chasing
simplicity—machines, like the Corvette Z06
or 911 R, that digitally simulate analog feel.
Does any of that interest you?
AR: Yes. But more interesting is—and again,
this is a small market—four wheels, a steering
wheel, superlight weight, and power. The weight
ratio is everything. And what type of horsepower.
How do these horses feel?
Maybe we run an engine on the dyno, and we
come up with a beautiful number. I say, “Okay.
Looks great. But I want to feel them first.” We call
this, in German, the Popometer. Popo is the butt.
SS: It’s conflicting, though, if you love
technology. Because progress has undeniably
made the automobile better, faster, easier.
AR: It’s a great achievement. Anybody can
drive anything. With the 911, they used to say,
“Widow maker. This must be a crazy guy that
drives that car, a hero.” And today, anybody can
drive a 911, because it’s so tamed. [Cars are] so
much alike, it’s unbelievable. If you were blindfolded,
you sometimes wouldn’t know which car
you were in.
SS: A lot of people think Porsche doesn’t
understand the appeal of simple. That it’s more
than just numbers—the widespread protest
when the last 911 GT3 wasn’t available with a
clutch pedal, for example.
AR: When Porsche had only one model, it was
a cult. We were always flashing headlights when
you saw another Porsche, and sometimes you
would even stop and talk, make friends. “Let’s go
for a beer.” Exchange information. “Oh, did this
also break? Did you have a chain-tension problem?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course.” [Laughs.]
But you never blamed the company, because
this was part of the whole charm. And when
Porsche was in negative headlines, you would
quickly order another one to help them.
SS: So much of that culture changed because
car companies had to change. Manufacturing
a safe, clean, and fast automobile is now
exponentially more complex.
AR: It used to be, you went there, at the factory,
picked up your car. You had to pay in cash. There
was a little vault. There was blonde lady sitting
there. Thick glass, like at a bank, and you were
counting your money, and she pulled the money
in, and she gave you a receipt, and then you could
pick up your car.
SS: How long did that last?
AR: To the Eighties, even. And then, [they gave
you a new car with] an empty gas tank. [Laughs.]
But you were given a free lunch. The same lunch
that the workers ate. The same ladies that served
80
R O A D A N D T R A C K . C O M J U LY 2 0 1 7

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D R I V I N G W I T H
the workers, but you had white tablecloths and fancier napkins.
Harald Wagner, the sales chief, he would maybe give [your
wife] a scarf as a present. That was the charm of that company.
When you were picking up a car and loving it, no matter how
simple the food, because it was the best in the world on that day.
SS: What would you change about Porsche, as the company
sits now?
AR: Too corporate. Every way, shape, and form.
SS: To be fair, though, the market pretty much requires it.
AR: Back then, when the car was purchased, people had the
money made. Today, it’s leased. It was a different culture. “Okay,
I’m going to lease a Porsche. Ah, I had it a year. I think I will
do an Audi now.” It’s more of a fashion thing. When you had to
make every penny to pay for that car first, you had a different
relationship with it.
SS: The new cars you’re building . . .
AR: We’re coming through an evolution, and the evolution is
going backward, actually. [Laughs.]
SS: Judging by how busy the shop is, people like it.
AR: They like the purity and simplicity. I have a customer in
the United States, he’s a fashion designer. He says, “This is an
honest car.”
SS: The shop echoes that—the place is just so warm and
friendly. The building is small enough to see through.
AR: It’s just the way we do things, you know? People say,
“This reminds me of what Porsche was in the Fifties and Sixties.”
Customers knew certain people in the factory. They had
this relationship. We want to continue like this. This is the best
way, I think. ■
1987 Ruf CTR Yellow Bird
(TESTED JULY 1987)
price $142,900 (in 1987)
engine dohc 24-valve
twin-turbo 3.4-liter h-6
peak output 463 hp @ 6100 rpm
457 lb-ft @ 5400 rpm
transmission 5-speed manual, rwd
l x w x h 168.9 x 69.9 x 51.6 in
weight 2580 lb (est)
0–60 mph 4.0 sec
0–1/4-mile 11.7 sec @ 133.5 mph
top speed 211 mph
82
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THE JOURNEY | ACURA NSX
ONCE MORE,
INTO THE GREAT
WIDE OPEN
YESTERDAY’S ADVENTURE IN THE SUPERCAR OF TOMORROW.
BY PETER EGAN | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARC URBANO
88
JULY 2017

T H E J O U R N E Y
love story assignments that begin with the question
“How would you like to . . .” There’s almost always an element
of adventure involved, for better or worse.
“How would you like to drive a real Russian T-34 tank
through the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl?” might be an
example from the “worse” column, but my latest offer
sounded pretty good.
Editor-in-chief Kim Wolfkill had called my rural Wisconsin
home and asked, “How would you like to drive a new Acura
NSX to California? Maybe retrace the route you took 32 years
ago in that Dino.”
Ah yes, the “Dino: Car of the North” story from the winter of
1985, when my friend Chris Beebe and I drove a 1972 Dino 246
GT to California and almost froze to death. The car belonged
to our friend Carl Maguire, who was moving to San Diego. We
soon discovered that the Italian “heater” did nothing of the sort,
and I likened its output to “a hamster blowing through a straw.”
But we lost no toes or fingers, and the Dino never faltered.
I didn’t imagine the NSX would falter either, and—being an
Acura product—it probably has a working heater. Also, we’d be
leaving in April, rather than January.
Normally, accepting this assignment would be a no-brainer
(my favorite kind of brainer, incidentally), but I’d just finished
reading a lengthy newspaper article about the steep decline of
the Great Barrier Reef corals and fish habitats, due to rising
ocean temperatures, and I had to ask myself if the world really
needed another supercar at this point.
As a person who goes to a traditional Wisconsin fish fry
nearly every Friday night, I take any threat against seafood—or
even tartar sauce—quite seriously.
But then I reasoned that the NSX is not just another Ecclesiastical
proof that “all is vanity” but a test
bed of hybrid technology, whose brilliance
might trickle down into Honda Civics and
the like. After all, the hyperpowerful NSX
gets slightly better fuel mileage than most
of our everyday pickups and SUVs, so maybe
engineering progress—with the afterburners
turned down a bit—could save us from
ourselves.
All this moralizing went through my head
in about six seconds, and I told Kim I’d do it.
I’d need a co-driver, of course, and Barb
couldn’t go, because she was taking care of
The journey begins at the Egan home in Wisconsin
(left) and heads west. Opposite: Old-school roadtripping:
A navigator riding shotgun with a gazetteer
in his lap and an apple at arm’s reach to sustain
him until the next diner.
90
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

two of our ailing house pets, so I called the next most likely
victim: Chris Beebe.
Chris was my boss when I worked as a mechanic at his repair
shop, Foreign Car Specialists, in Madison, Wisconsin, during
the Seventies, and he now lives just across the creek from us. I
could have called him from our front porch with a bullhorn but
decided using the phone would be more decorous.
“Well, I hate to miss Easter weekend with my family,” he said,
“but I’m very curious about that car . . .”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said, hanging up quickly.
By the time we got to the Mississippi, we had pretty
much concluded that the NSX is one of those almost
laughably competent modern sports cars with so much
grip, you’d need a death wish to put it off the road.
So, on a sunny April Monday morning, we threw our minimal
luggage into the tiny trunk behind the engine bay, hit the start
button, pushed down on the parking-brake symbol, punched
the D/M (Japanese for “Go!”) button, and headed down the
driveway. I pointed the nose west and blazed off in the general
direction of California.
The car howled up our long hill in an eyeball-flattening blur
of speed, cycling seamlessly through its nine-speed dual-clutch
gearbox like a trip-hammer. (I’d taken three of my friends for
a spin the previous day, and the most printable reaction had
been, “Sweet mother of God!”) At full song, the engine note
reminded me of a table saw ripping through fine teak, even
though I’d never heard such a thing.
At the first stop sign, I turned to Chris and said, “I do believe
this thing is faster than my ’91 Miata and even more sophisticated
than my ’65 Morgan.”
He smiled equivocally but said nothing. I believe we were both
thinking, Yes, but is it more fun or charismatic? Time would tell.
We stayed on two-lane, winding farm roads through the
slowly greening hills of western Wisconsin,
and by the time we got to the
Mississippi had pretty much concluded
that the NSX is one of those almost
laughably competent modern sports
cars with so much grip, you’d need a
death wish to put it off the road. But if
you do miss a corner, you might end up
somewhere in western Australia.
The NSX has a pair of 36-hp electric motors that connect
independently to each front driveshaft, adding torque or braking
force to control yaw or recharge the lithium-ion battery
behind the seats. When you hit loose sand or the random patch
of cow manure, you can sense those motors subtly working to
keep the car on its intended arc. They also add torque between
shifts—as does a 47-hp electric motor/generator at the rear—to
augment the thrust of that 500-hp, 3.5-liter twin-turbo V-6.
Total output is 573 hp. The Dino, incidentally, had 192.
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 91

T H E J O U R N E Y
Of course, you don’t need to know any of this to go fast in
the NSX. All controls—including the brake pedal, which is connected
by wire to giant Brembos—replicate nicely the mechanical
sensations of a refined and dialed-in traditional sports car.
Remarkable.
Naturally, by the time we crossed the Mississippi at Prairie
du Chien, an ominous bank of dark storm clouds had settled
over Iowa. Again.
ON THE FIRST DAY OF OUR DINO TRIP IN 1985, we’d run
straight into the teeth of a blizzard but somehow
made it to western Iowa before we got stuck. At
Estherville, we came slithering sideways
into a motel parking lot, where the car ceased to make
forward progress. But at least we had a room for the
night—and were still alive.
Near Clear Lake (where Buddy Holly’s plane crashed
on a night “just like this” in 1959), a farmer had tried
to kill us by blasting out of his driveway in a Ford LTD,
directly across our path.
Chris instantly downshifted the Dino and accelerated
explosively through a huge drift on the shoulder, sliding
sideways back onto the road without hitting the LTD.
And that is why I’m still here and getting older by the minute.
Not that I’m complaining.
This time, the storm held off for a while and we motored west
on Highway 9 past the small towns of Manly and Fertile, just
12 miles apart.
“Manly and Fertile?” I said to Chris. “What kind of hankypanky
is going on around here?”
“I’m just glad I don’t have to name their football teams,” Chris
said. Our minds silently reeled.
We stopped in Estherville for lunch, too early to need our
old motel—which in any case is gone, its
remains no doubt buried beneath all the
fast-food joints and car dealerships that
weren’t there 32 years ago.
As we drove through Lake Park, it
started to snow, hard and slantwise.
“Feels like Groundhog Day,” Chris said.
But as we crossed the South Dakota
border, the snow stopped, as if by toggle
switch. We caught Iowa sleeping for once.
While driving along through one small
town after another, we’d been looking for
a traditional drive-up motel, but those
are almost extinct now, so we lodged by
luxurious default at a Hilton in the nicely
restored old downtown of Sioux Falls.
We got stiffy out of the car after a long
day but preserved our dignity by not rolling
onto the sidewalk and crawling on all
fours in front of the other guests.
Yes, the NSX is low. So much so that our
friend Bruce Livermore said we should
call this story “No Car for Old Men.”
Interior comfort is good, even though
Chris and I could have used another inch of tilt in the seatbacks,
as we both tend to drive in the “space launch” position.
We also could have used an owner’s manual with the car, just
to figure out the rather unintuitive touchscreen audio controls.
We briefly considered hiring a 10-year-old kid to show us how
it worked but decided we’d rather listen to the engine anyway.
Our favorite control in the car was the big Dynamic Mode dial
in the middle of the console, which Chris dubbed “the volume
knob.” It has four settings: Quiet, Sport, Sport Plus, and Track.
Quiet is essentially Prius on steroids, Sport releases the
car’s inner snarling tiger, and Sport Plus makes the tiger’s eyes
glow an evil red while turning up the growl. It also tightens
the shift points and anticipates your need for quick, beautifully
The NSX essentially takes you from your
grocery-store parking lot to the starting grid
at Le Mans with a few clicks of the dial.
It’s the ultimate chameleon.
matched downshifts when you get lazy and don’t use the levers
on the steering wheel. The Track setting is just full attack all
the time.
We used Quiet while pulling up to load luggage—or when low
on fuel—and Sport for the majority of driving. The upper two
levels were used mostly as a euphoria booster on tight mountain
roads. The NSX essentially takes you from your grocery-store
parking lot to the starting grid at Le Mans with a few clicks of
the dial. It’s the ultimate chameleon.
In South Dakota, the land begins to look more western;
farms magically turn into ranches, and cornfields into open
range. But the wide-open West really kicks in at the Missouri
92
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

Do you hate your detector?
It was your best friend, now it never shuts up.
The good news: New cars have a safety feature, the blind-spot
warning system. Many models use K-band radar to “see” nearby cars.
The bad news: Onboard radar turns each of these “seeing”
cars into mobile K-band false alarms. A blind-spot system may tag
along with you for miles.
You’re stuck, not knowing
which car to maneuver
away from. GPS is no
solution. It doesn’t work
on mobile falses.
Problem solved: V1 has
an algorithm that recognizes
these mobile false alarms and
excludes them, yet never blocks
a real threat. We’ve named it
Junk-K Fighter. And it’s now
built into all new V1s.
Detectors that don’t detect:
It’s easy to make a detector without
false alarms. Just give up on longrange
warnings. Our competitors
play that game, we don’t.
Satisfaction guaranteed: Try it for 30 days.
If it doesn’t satisfy for any reason, send it back for
a full refund.
V1 wins war against false alarms: New
computer code weeds out phony K-band alerts.
Why you will love V1
First obligation of V1:
V1 will never miss a threat.
Quiet is nice, but missing
an ambush is fatal. That’s
why we don’t use GPS. GPS
knows only location, and if
the frequency range of a new
threat is the same as that of a
blocked alarm, sorry, but GPS
programming demands silence
at that location, even if it’s a
trap. V1 will never fail you
that way.
© 2017 VRI
Mike Valentine
Radar Fanatic
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T H E J O U R N E Y
River valley, a beautiful, shorn landscape
that has you looking for covered wagons.
From Interior, we cruised on Highway
240 into the still-snow-dusted hills
of the Badlands, whose beauty always
has an ancient, timeless feel to it, and
you half expect to see mastodons grazing
with buffalo. You look at those many
bands of exposed strata, and suddenly
you can see yourself and your fancy car as future fossils, mere
traces of color in a bed of ash or sandstone. Good for humility
but depressing if you have a $200,000 car loan.
We pulled into Rapid City for the evening and discovered
our hotel was just down the road from Uncle Milt’s Alignment,
where Chris and I had finally gotten the Dino’s left front wheel
aligned after two days of ant-eatering (as Henry Manney would
say) across Iowa’s icy roads.
We went there in the morning, and the shop is still in
business. Milt’s son, Marshall Schleve, a car enthusiast who
autocrosses an early Mini, runs it now. Milt, he said, died on
Christmas in 2002. Nice to see the shop still there. Architectural
and commercial continuity hadn’t been the rule on this trip.
Later that day, we drove down to Mount Rushmore and discovered
it now has a parking ramp ($10) and a decorative colonnade
leading to the scenic overlook, with a museum and gift
shop. Last time we were here, there was just a parking lot with
some picnic tables in the woods, which I preferred. This is a
monument you should be startled to discover in the wilderness,
and it should speak for itself.
And it does speak, powerfully. The presidential faces are perfectly
rendered, almost alive in their expressive majesty, and
you think how easily sculptor Gutzon Borglum could have gotten
it wrong but didn’t.
We drove back through the overlook tunnel on Alternate 16,
You look at those many
bands of exposed strata,
and suddenly you can see
yourself and your fancy
car as future fossils.
where we once photographed the Dino,
and looked back to see a pair of B-1 bombers
do a flyby of the monument. They
didn’t have their Dynamic Mode dials set
on Quiet, and the thunder was glorious.
Out of the Black Hills, into the windy
high plains of Wyoming, dropping down
toward Colorado. On a nearly empty
four-lane stretch of Highway 85 we
were, shall I say, nicely making way, when a dull-gray Saturn
sedan with dark windows and no plates came up from behind
and passed at about 100 mph. A speed it maintained for the
next half hour.
“Wouldn’t you like to see who’s driving that thing?” I asked
Chris.
“I’m not sure I want to know.”
When we both stopped for gas, the dark window of the Saturn
rolled down, and a cheerful young guy with the aura of a
surfer dude said, “Cool car! What is that thing?” We told him
and asked what year his Saturn is.
“A ’91.”
“Is it stock?”
“It is right now, but I plan to do some work on it.” Then he
drove away.
Back on the highway, I told Chris, “Well, there’s my next car:
a ’91 Saturn. NSX performance at a fraction of the price!”
We crossed into Colorado and pulled off at Fort Collins to stay
with my bike/car-buff friend Mike Mosiman, who was batching
it while his wife, Bonnie, was off visiting relatives. We dined
and drank margaritas at the Rio Grande Mexican restaurant,
and the next morning, Mike rode with Chris in the NSX while
I followed in a 2004 Mazdaspeed MX-5 Miata that belongs to
Mike’s son Bobby—better known as Dr. Robert Mosiman to his
ER patients at the local hospital.
94
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

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Mike was blown away by the performance
and grip of the Acura, but I was also having
a great time in the Miata, its turbocharged
engine doing just fine as we blazed up Rist Canyon
Road into the imposing Front Range. I felt
like a catfish following a large manta ray, but the
lively agility of the Miata canceled out any sense
of envy. If I’d been forced to drive it to California,
I would not have been heartbroken. By the
time we traded cars at the junction of Highway
14 and Stove Prairie Road, I’d all but forgotten
my dream of someday owning a Saturn.
We were in high country now, on Highway 40
across northern Colorado: white peaks, sprawling
valleys, conifers, cabins, and cattle ranches.
Just outside Maybell, the traffc was too heavy
for passing, so we joined a parade of cars and trucks going west.
An oncoming state patrol offcer did a double take, and the
inevitable brake lights came on. He made a quick U-turn,
passed the SUV behind us, and pulled us over.
The cop was cheerful and polite. “Were you slowing down
after passing other cars?” he asked.
“No, we were just cruising with the flow of traffc.”
“Well, I got you at 74 in a 65 with my rear radar.”
While he checked my license and registration, six other
police vehicles of various shapes and jurisdictions showed up
and parked on both sides of the road. It looked like a major
bust, but we got away with only a warning, and the police convention
dispersed. Then three more cops went by in the next
few miles. Maybe they just wanted to check out the alien silver
2017 Acura NSX
base price/as tested
$157,800/$193,415
engine dohc 24-valve
twin-turbo 3.5-liter v-6
electric motors
twin direct-drive front,
single direct-drive rear
peak total output
573 hp @ 6700 rpm
476 lb-ft @ 3000 rpm
transmission
9-speed dual-clutch
automatic, awd
l x w x h 176.0 x 76.3 x 47.8 in
weight 3868 lb
0–60 mph 3.1 sec
top speed 191 mph
on sale now
spacecraft in their midst. I certainly would.
So we crept cautiously out of Colorado, accelerated
into Utah, and spent the night in Vernal,
with its famous dinosaur museum and several
dinosaur statues of varying ferocity and authenticity
(one was wearing an Easter bonnet), and
swung south of Salt Lake City on Highway 191.
Utah, as I always remember but fail to recall
in scope, has one knockout vista after another,
with an ever-changing landscape that looks like
the work of a stage-set designer with a degree in
geology. It might be the most beautiful, varied
state we have.
Just west of Delta on Highway 6, we passed
a sign that said Next Services 83 Miles, and by
the time we wafted quietly into the Border Inn
at the Nevada line, our digital readout said we had exactly zero
gallons left. The car took 14.272 gallons after traveling 329.7
miles, for an average of 23.1 mpg.
Curiously, Chris had sputtered into this same gas station on
his first trip to California in 1964, running on fumes in his Bugeye
Sprite after getting lost all night on a badly marked detour.
Broke, he worked there all day in exchange for a tank of gas.
Oh, to be 18 again. No cellphone or credit cards, just roaming
free on the land in a small English car with low oil pressure.
Those were the days.
Fueled up, we climbed over the beautiful, rugged Egan
Range, named for Mormon pioneer Howard Egan, who helped
blaze the Pony Express trail. At 44, he was their oldest rider.
And, at 69, I’m laying claim to being the oldest Egan ever to
96
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

T H E J O U R N E Y
cross the Egan Range in an NSX. I’ll let you know what Guinness
says. Chris briefly hit 135 mph in my honor.
Nightfall found us in the historic mining town of Tonopah at
the elegant old Mizpah Hotel, opened in 1907 and beautifully
restored in 2011. It had two suites left. I got the one with a bed
that looked like a buckboard hauling a mattress on four wooden
wagon wheels, and Chris got the Lady in Red Suite, so named
because a lady of the night was murdered outside its door. Her
ghost is said to walk the halls after dark. Among the previous
guests who’d slept in Chris’s ornate room are Mae West, Amanda
Blake, Annette Funicello, Carol Lynley, and Jamie Lee Curtis.
I think the only celebrity who might have stayed in my
room was Gabby Hayes, but my rustic wagon/bed was very
comfortable and—I don’t mind pointing out—considerably
more masculine.
If you’re driving into California for the first time—or the hundredth—you
could do worse than taking Highway 6 across the
border and then jogging west on Highway 120, a sinuous sportscar
road with the majestic white wall of the Sierra Nevada filling
your windshield and the weird alkaline tufa formations of
Mono Lake to your right.
Mount Rushmore: Powerful
as ever, now with modern
touches. Egan draws police
attention again (as in 1985).
The trip ends at R&T’s
former headquarters.
I don’t think the NSX will ever be as much a beloved
artifact as the Dino, with its beautiful Pininfarina
body. Instead, it’s a milestone of technology and
design and a signpost to the future.
We headed down the Owens
River valley through Lone Pine
with Mount Whitney to the west,
past what I’ve always called “Ricochet Rocks,” a boulder-strewn
landscape where scores of westerns were filmed. Further south,
it’s High Desert, where the likes of Steve McQueen, Malcolm
Smith, and the Ekins brothers once rode their Triumphs
and Huskys across open desert.
Then, we infiltrated the growing flood of traffic
on I-15, 91, and 55 flowing toward the Beach
Cities. In Newport Beach, we pulled into the
empty parking lot of the old Road & Track offce
at 1499 Monrovia Avenue, where I worked for 10
years. This lovely, architect-designed building was
recently saved from demolition and condo-ization
by Kobe Bryant, but its future remains uncertain.
In any event, we were home. Or at least done with
our drive.
Acura staff would take over from here, servicing
the car, fixing a stone chip and crack in the windshield
(the only mishap), and passing our faithful,
trouble-free mount along to other R&T journalists,
while Chris and I flew home. The onboard
computer showed we’d traveled 2801 miles and
averaged 23.0 mpg for the trip.
Final thoughts on the NSX and the Dino?
Well, performance-wise, as Kerouac used to
say, comparisons are odious. The Dino is a 1972
car that did 0–60 mph in 7.9 seconds, and the NSX does it in
3.1. The Dino was of this world, and the Acura is a killer car that
accelerates like a moonbeam through space and hits 191 mph.
In some ways, its personality reminds me of one of those
screen characters that Harrison Ford or Liam Neeson play so
well—the intellectual family man who turns out to have an
alternate life as a deadly agent for the CIA.
Humorless hit men with shaved heads and
five-o’clock shadows mess with him at their
peril. In the end, he’s good at his job and
much smarter than they are.
In short, it’s a spectacular performance
car of quietly handsome, rather than ostentatious,
design.
That said, I don’t think the NSX will ever
be as much a beloved artifact as the Dino, with its beautiful
Pininfarina body. Instead, it’s a milestone of technology and
design and a signpost to the future. In a way, the genetic code it
passes along is as important as the car itself. Like the majority
of modern cars, it is what it does. In this case, it does just about
everything perfectly—and for $100,000 less than a pristine
1972 Dino in today’s classic-car market.
Chris says, given the choice, he’d probably take the svelte,
charismatic, eternally restorable Dino. But I might be more
inclined to buy the eminently practical, unearthly fast NSX and
use the leftover 100 grand to restore my Morgan. Maybe spend
the rest on a Stearman PT-17 biplane or get a Westsail 32 cutter
and head for Tahiti.
High-maintenance romanticism we have always with us, but
perfection is rare. ■
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 97

MOTORSPORT
TURNING
POINTS
TEN MOMENTS THAT CHANGED THE COURSE OF MOTORSPORT
BY PRESTON LERNER
I
N JUNE 1946, scarcely a year after hostilities
had ended in Europe, the tiny Paris
suburb of Saint-Cloud hosted a grand
prix. The cars ran on cobblestone roads
through town, mostly out of necessity;
gas was still rationed, so spectators would
have been hard-pressed to drive to a track.
One of the fastest cars, an Alfa Romeo
Tipo 158, had survived the war hidden in a
cheese factory while its driver, Jean-Pierre Wimille, was fighting
in the French Resistance. The event is a footnote in grandprix
history, but it demonstrated the hunger for racing after the
war. Two American enthusiasts 3600 miles from Saint-Cloud
shared that hunger. They featured the race on the cover of a new
magazine called Road & Track. We’ve been paying close attention
to the action ever since. Here are 10 moments that brought
motorsport from those humble beginnings to the multibilliondollar,
globe-spanning business we follow today.
SPORTS-CAR RACING AT WATKINS GLEN | 1948
The last road race in the United States had been run in 1940.
It wasn’t until 1948, a year after this magazine’s debut, that law
student Cameron Argetsinger convinced the nascent Sports Car
Club of America to stage a race in and around Watkins Glen, a
bucolic resort town in upstate New York. On October 2, 1948,
known in local lore as “the Day They Stopped the Trains,” 23
cars sped down Franklin Street for the qualifying junior prix,
and 15 cars returned for the longer grand prix set along the
same twisting, picturesque 6.6-mile route. The race was won by
Frank Griswold—also the winner of the race in 1940—
in an Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B at an average speed of 63.8
mph. Briggs Cunningham was second; Argetsinger,
SINCE THE INCEPTION OF ROAD & TRACK.
Our first cover
featured the ’46
Saint-Cloud GP.
ninth. By 1950, races were being run on public roads in Elkhart
Lake, Pebble Beach, and Palm Springs. Sports-car racing—and
R&T—was here to stay.
When I meet friends and members of the racing fraternity
[in Europe], it is quite natural that the conversation
evolves into a discussion of road racing in Europe, and the
possibilities of this sport in America. . . . If, some day soon,
it were possible to see a return of this sport in America, it
would enable the numerous skillful American drivers to
compete in international events. —“Road Racing for America!”
by Alice Caracciola, Road & Track, August 1948
HOT-RODDERS TAKE BONNEVILLE | 1949
In 1949, a group of Southern California hot-rodders broadened
their horizons beyond the dry lakes of the Mojave Desert and
rumbled onto the Bonneville Salt Flats. The flats were considered
a major venue for top-speed attempts: Two years earlier,
Englishman John Cobb had gone 403.1 mph there in a purpose-built
behemoth powered by a pair of supercharged W-12
airplane engines. So, locals likely didn’t expect much from the
ragtag armada of hopped-up highboys, crude lakesters, and
belly-tank streamliners.
Dean Batchelor, a World War II veteran, Lockheed worker,
and weekend wrench, wriggled into a streamliner prepared by
So-Cal speed shop owner Alex Xydias and proceeded to make a
one-way pass at an astonishing speed of 193.54 mph. Not as fast
as Cobb, but an amazing feat nonetheless, considering Batchelor
managed to do it with a Mercury flathead V-8 making one-tenth
the power, fitted to a prosaic Model T frame. Back in
SoCal, the first sanctioned drag races were held shortly
after, and the National Hot Rod Association was
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017 99

M O T O R S P O R T
established in 1951, but hot-rodding’s Woodstock was Bonneville
1949. Batchelor wrote about his experience in R&T, where
he’d later become editor-in-chief.
About 100 yards past the second light, the tread came off the
right front tire. I thought it had blown out and was getting
ready for trouble when the left front let go. Luckily, it was
only the tread that came off. I hate to think of what would
have happened had they actually blown out. —“How It Feels to
Drive a Ford V-8 193 mph!” by Dean Batchelor, December 1949
JAGUAR WINS LE MANS | 1953
Racing was once the crucible where automotive innovations
were validated (or junked, as the case may be). The sport’s ability
to improve the automobile was rarely clearer than the 24 Hours
of Le Mans in 1953. The fastest car, at least in a straight line, was
the Chrysler Hemi–powered Cunningham C-5R, nicknamed
“the Smiling Shark” because of its aerodynamic body and predatory
snout. The quickest lap was turned by a brutish V-12 Ferrari.
But the Jaguar C-types boasted a decisive new technology: disc
brakes, which let them carry speed further into the corners. “The
Jaguars would go flying by us on the straight, full-bore, while we
were gearing down and braking for the hairpin,” recalled John
Fitch, who co-drove a Cunningham, finishing third.
C-types finished 1-2-4 (and ninth) and raised the average
speed of the race by 9.14 mph. The victory demonstrated that
the surest route to success in motorsport was to build a better
beast. Thus, race cars sprouted wings in the 1960s, ground
effects in the 1970s, and driver aids in the 1980s. Much of this
technology eventually found its way into road cars, which,
ironically, are now more sophisticated than race cars in many
respects, because sanctioning bodies often ban breakthroughs
that threaten the balance of power.
DEATH AT INDIANAPOLIS | 1964
The most welcome change in racing during
the past 70 years is that it kills people
less often. This radical makeover was
the product of decades of incremental
safety changes, but can, to a large degree,
be traced to the second lap of the 1964
Indianapolis 500. Dave MacDonald, a
promising Indy 500 rookie driving an evilhandling
car carrying 45 gallons of gasoline,
spun in Turn 4, hit the inside wall,
and slid across the front straight. Veteran
racing driver Eddie Sachs tried and failed
to shoot the gap between MacDonald’s
flaming car and the outside wall. Both cars
exploded in a fireball that caused the race
to be stopped for nearly two hours. Death
was nothing new to Indy; more than four
dozen men had been killed at the Speedway
since 1909. Yet there was something
fundamentally different about this tragedy,
or at least the outrage it inspired.
The Indy crowd watches in horror as young Dave
MacDonald and veteran driver Eddie Sachs burn.
In the 1960s, motorsport began scoring major-league sponsors
and mainstream media coverage. As racing’s profile rose,
so did the scrutiny it received. Critics challenged the notion
that death was the cost of doing business. New fuel cells were
mandated for Indy cars. The Nomex fire suit was introduced
in 1967, and the full-face, hard-shell helmet in 1968. It wasn’t
until Ayrton Senna was killed in 1994 that safety became a priority
on a worldwide basis. But the stirrings of the safety movement
date back to that day at Indy in 1964.
The 48th running of the Indianapolis 500 was dominated by
one of the most fearful fires in the history of racing. . . . USAC
will (hopefully) pay more attention to the problems involved
in conveying the fuel safely all the way from the tank truck to
the combustion chamber. —“Indianapolis 500,” by Tony Hogg,
August 1964
BRUCE MEYERS TACKLES BAJA | 1966
Off-road racing as we know it was born on a dare. In 1966,
Bruce Meyers—creator of the Meyers Manx, the spunky
VW-based runabout that launched the dune-buggy craze—
attended a party thrown by Cycle World founder Joe Parkhurst.
Parkhurst bragged about the record motorcyclists had just set
on the untamed, thousand-mile route down Mexico’s Baja Peninsula
from Tijuana to La Paz.
“I think we can beat the bikes,” said Meyers’s buddy Ted Mangels.
“But we’ve got to bring the gas with us, so we don’t have to
stop.” They loaded Old Red—the Manx prototype—with 65 gallons
of fuel, filling not only the gas tank but also jerricans, milk
cartons, and three seven-gallon oxygen tanks. “They were a rolling
bomb,” said Winnie Meyers, Bruce’s wife. Despite a leaking
brake line pinched closed with a rock, a gearbox secured with
BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
100
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M O T O R S P O R T
yards of baling wire, and an encounter with a wayward cow,
the mangled Manx made it to La Paz in 34 hours, 45 minutes.
R&T’s Elaine Bond blasted out a press release: “Buggy Beats
Bikes in Baja.” Meyers’s achievement inspired the formation
of the National Off-Road Racing Association and the Mexican
1000 Rally, which attracted superstars such as Parnelli Jones
and created new ones, like Ivan “Ironman” Stewart.
One of the heavy pitches for the Long Beach GP was how much
it was like Monaco. I am like Sophia Loren in that we are both
members of the human race and have button things on our
chests, but there the similarity stops. —“Brouhaha on Ocean
Boulevard,” by Henry N. Manney III, January 1976
ECCLESTONE TAKES CENTER STAGE | 1981
For better and for worse, modern Formula 1
racing was born in a business meeting. In 1981,
factions warring for control of the sport hammered
out the Concorde Agreement, which gave
the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile
authority over technical regulations
and left the business end to the Formula One
Constructors Association. FOCA chief Bernie
Ecclestone negotiated a deal with the European
Seedy Long Beach (left) was an odd race venue in ’70s.
Scheming Bernie Ecclestone made a fortune in the ’80s.
STREET RACING FINDS THE FORMULA | 1975
Pop quiz: What’s the most influential street race in the world?
It’s not the Monaco Grand Prix, a glamorous but anachronistic
remnant of an era when many races were run on public roads.
The correct answer is the Long Beach GP, which pioneered the
dynamic blend of urban spectacle and corporate bonanza—
gaudy race cars slithering between glass skyscrapers—that we
now take for granted. The event was the brainchild of expatriate
British travel agent Chris Pook, who envisioned a circuit
through the city, which at the time was lined with X-rated
movie theaters and tattoo parlors.
The first race, in 1975, featured Formula 5000 cars, macho
single-seaters packing lusty stock-block V-8s. “I was a staunch
supporter from the beginning,” recalled four-time Long Beach
GP winner Mario Andretti. “But in the back of my mind, I
thought, If this flies, it’ll be a miracle.” In fact, it was such a hit,
Formula 1 arrived the next year and stayed until 1983, when
sanctioning fees spiraled out of control. Long Beach has hosted
Indy cars since 1984 and is the second most popular race on
the series’ calendar behind the Indy 500. The event’s success
spawned dozens of street races in cities as unlikely as Niagara
Falls, San Jose, and Des Moines. Many failed, and even the best
street courses have detractors, but Long Beach and its spin-offs
took racing to a broader audience.
Broadcasting Union to televise every race. Worldwide viewership
grew exponentially, attracting bigger sponsors and allowing
Ecclestone to demand higher fees from race promoters.
Television rendered trackside spectators a secondary consideration,
which allowed F1 to abandon historic European venues
for grand complexes in Asia and the Middle East, where
state-funded promoters could afford exorbitant sanctioning
fees. Ecclestone, who reigned for decades as “F1 Supremo”
and amassed one of the largest fortunes in the United Kingdom,
remains a polarizing figure. But under his stewardship,
F1 became the extravagantly profitable pinnacle of motorsport
and the model to which every sanctioning body aspires.
“Motor racing has been run in an amateurish manner for
far too long, and it’s time we got it onto a proper business
footing.” The person who is [saying] this is a 46-year-old,
5-foot, 3-inch human dynamo . . . Bernie Ecclestone. “Profile:
Bernie Ecclestone,” by David Phipps, December 1975
LONG BEACH: BOB HARMEYER/GETTY IMAGES
102
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

Three stunning retrospectives
celebrating the past and present
of these iconic cars.
Car aficionados and lovers of classic sports cars will savor this
collection of stunning original photographs and articles.
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M O T O R S P O R T
SENNA SPEARS PROST | 1990
If Wimille, the grand-prix legend on that first R&T cover, were
to watch a contemporary Formula 1 race, what would amaze
him most? The 230-mph cars? The lavish hospitality suites?
The multimillion-dollar team budgets? No, the biggest eyeopener
would be the lack of driver etiquette: the start-line chop.
The low-percentage lunge. The straightaway weave. The outright
block. In Wimille’s day and for long after, such moves were
unheard of—racing was deadly enough without drivers endangering
each other. That all changed in the opening moments of
the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix.
Ayrton Senna was on the pole, Alain Prost next to him. If
neither driver finished the race, Senna would be crowned world
champion. When Prost jumped into the lead at the start, Senna
speared him at high speed. Championship secured. Even more
shocking was Senna’s admission afterward that the crash had
been premeditated, although he tried to justify the widely
denounced move as payback for the previous year, when Prost
tangled with him at the chicane to win his own championship.
(The jury is still out on who was to blame for that wreck.) For
Senna’s rivals, the takeaway was clear. It was no coincidence
that Michael Schumacher crashed into his championship
rivals, in 1994 and 1997, and it’s easy to spot Senna’s example in
the driving of Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen. Today, “by
any means necessary” is standard operating procedure even in
the lowliest go-kart race.
George, president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, who
transformed NASCAR into a national player.
In 1994, George green-lit the Brickyard 400—the first race
at IMS for anything other than Indy cars since 1916. The event
attracted more than 250,000 spectators, a record attendance
for NASCAR. Better still, it was won by hometown hero Jeff
Gordon, the antithesis of the good ol’ boys who had dominated
the sport since its inception, and NASCAR’s first crossover
superstar. Meanwhile, George established the breakaway Indy
Racing League, creating a rift that killed interest in American
open-wheel racing. By the turn of the century, NASCAR had
supplanted Indy racing as the premier form of motorsport in
the States.
It was the sound of Barbarians inside the gate, for the
Pashas of Indy had unlocked their temple and let the
hairy NASCAR in. And oh, Lordy, they did make a noise.
—“NASCARnival on Bricks,” by Bob Judd, November 1994
GREATEST SPECTACLE GOES SPEC | 2008
On the afternoon before Bump Day for the 2008 Indianapolis
500, reigning rookie of the year Phil Giebler hammered
the Turn 1 wall, desperately attempting to get his antiquated
Panoz up to speed. With the car’s fiery exit, the Greatest
Spectacle in Racing was reduced to a spec series. Every car in
NASCAR WINS AT INDY | 1994
Let’s shelve the myth that the CBS broadcast of the 1979 Daytona
500—during which Cale Yarborough brawled with the Allison
brothers—was the event that brought NASCAR into prominence.
Check out the footage on YouTube: The fight is barely visible,
lasts maybe six seconds, and is about as riveting as a default
ring tone. Plus, it was a one-off broadcast. ESPN and, later, TNN
began covering stock-car racing in the 1980s, but it was Tony
Tension ran high between Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna
after the crash at the ’90 Japanese GP (left). Diversity did
not rule the day at Indy in ’08 (above).
the race would be a Dallara chassis powered by a
Honda engine.
Indy had been down this road before. In 1960, the
field consisted entirely of traditional front-engine
chassis powered by Offys. But that was merely the
calm before the storm caused by the arrival of Jack
Brabham’s rear-engine Cooper-Climax in 1961, after which
Indy served as the high-speed proving ground for technology
ranging from turbocharging to aerodynamic aids. Innovation
often leads to dull racing, however, as the fastest cars pull away
from the pack. IndyCar’s solution was to issue ever more restrictive
rules, culminating in only one competitive car. The de facto
situation became offcial for 2012, when the Dallara DW12 was
announced as the spec chassis for the series. ■
LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC; JONATHAN FERREY/GETTY IMAGES
104
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ROAD TEST SUMMARY
70TH-ANNIVERSARY EDITION
MAKE & MODEL
(ISSUE DATE)
PRICE AS TESTED
ENGINE TYPE
HORSEPOWER, SAE
TORQUE, LB-FT
CURB WEIGHT, LB
0–60 MPH, SEC
¼-MILE, SEC @ MPH
TOP SPEED, MPH
BRAKING 60–0 MPH, FT
ROADHOLDING, G
MAKE & MODEL
(ISSUE DATE)
PRICE AS TESTED
ENGINE TYPE
HORSEPOWER, SAE
TORQUE, LB-FT
CURB WEIGHT, LB
0–60 MPH, SEC
¼-MILE, SEC @ MPH
TOP SPEED, MPH
BRAKING 60–0 MPH, FT
ROADHOLDING, G
AC Cobra (6/64) $6343 V-8 271 314 2170 6.6 14.0 @ 99.5 139 — —
Acura NSX (6/93) $73,110 V-6 270 210 3015 5.8 14.0 @ 102.5 168 1 120 0.87
Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione 3 (1/08) $253,750 1 V-8 450 354 3495 1 4.2 12.4 @ 115.4 181 105 1.02
Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider (4/56) $2995 I-4 65 80 1940 14.8 20.0 @ — 100 — —
Aston Martin DB5 (10/64) $13,222 I-6 282 280 3450 8.6 16.2 @ 90.0 135 1 — —
Aston Martin Vanquish 3 (7/13) $303,635 V-12 565 457 3935 4.4 12.6 @ 117.0 183 112 0.95
Audi Quattro (6/82) $35,800 1 I-5 160 170 3115 8.2 16.2 @ 86.5 128 167 0.76
Audi R8 V10 Plus 3 (8/13) $191,445 V-10 550 398 3665 3.2 11.4 @ 123.4 197 118 0.96
Austin-Healey Sprite (8/58) $1795 I-4 48 52 1460 20.8 21.8 @ 62.0 79 — —
Austin-Morris Mini (3/60) $1295 I-4 37 44 1340 27.0 23.5 @ 57.0 75 — —
BMW 1 Series M Coupe (9/11) $50,460 I-6tt 335 332 3405 4.4 12.9 @ 108.4 155 2 117 0.95
BMW 2002 Turbo (7/74) $6600 I-4t 168 179 2290 8.0 16.2 @ — 124 — —
BMW 3.0 CS (7/73) $12,599 I-6 170 185 3175 10.0 17.2 @ 82.5 125 165 0.74
Bugatti Veyron 16.4 3 (2/07) $1,482,700 1 W-16qt 1001 922 4470 2.6 10.2 @ 142.9 253 111 0.94
Checker Marathon 3 (8/68) $4530 V-8 200 300 3840 13.9 19.7 @ 71.0 103 — —
Chevrolet Camaro Z/28 (6/68) $4435 V-8 350 1 320 1 3355 6.9 14.9 @ 100.0 132 — —
Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 (2/09) $117,000 V-8s 638 604 3325 1 3.3 11.4 @ 125.5 205 1 106 1.10
Citroën ID-19 (6/58) $2835 I-4 66 98 2640 19.1 22.2 @ 64.0 87 — —
Datsun 240Z (7/71) $3745 I-6 150 148 2355 8.7 17.1 @ 84.5 122 — 0.72
DeLorean DMC-12 (12/81) $25,000 V-6 130 162 2840 10.5 17.9 @ 76.5 109 158 0.77
De Tomaso Pantera (9/71) $9800 V-8 310 380 3155 6.8 14.5 @ 94.5 129 — 0.78
Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat 3 (3/16) $71,730 V-8s 707 650 4576 3.7 11.7 @ 125.1 204 114 0.90
Dodge Viper RT/10 (11/95) $68,850 V-10 415 488 3440 4.6 12.9 @ 112.0 170 1 136 0.96
Lexus LFA 3 (7/10) $388,475 1 V-10 552 354 3580 3.8 11.8 @ 124.4 202 1 112 1.04
Lexus LS 400 3 (2/90) $40,800 V-8 250 260 3865 8.3 16.3 @ 88.0 150 1 133 0.78
Lotus Esprit Turbo (7/88) $62,500 I-4t 215 192 2880 5.8 14.3 @ 101.5 152 1 147 0.82
Lotus Seven (7/61) $2897 I-4 40 50 960 14.3 19.2 @ 67.0 85 — —
Mazda MX-5 Miata (7/90) $15,740 I-4 116 100 2205 9.5 17.0 @ 81.5 117 1 154 0.83
Mazda RX-7 GS 3 (4/79) $9455 2-rotor 100 105 2435 9.7 17.7 @ 82.5 — 151 0.78
McLaren F1 (12/02) $1,000,000 1 V-12 627 479 2425 3.4 11.6 @ 125.0 231 1 127 0.86
Mercedes-Benz 190E Evo II (1/91) $72,960 I-4 232 181 2955 6.9 15.3 @ 93.5 154 140 —
Mercedes-Benz 300 SL (4/55) $7463 I-6 240 202 2710 7.4 15.2 @ — 140 — —
MG TC (11/81) $1895 I-4 54 63 1840 21.2 21.8 @ — 75 — —
Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VIII (3/03) $30,600 1 I-4t 271 273 3265 1 5.1 13.8 @ 101.5 155 1 117 0.97
Morgan Plus 8 Turbo (8/80) $27,625 V-8 225 1 240 1 2285 6.8 15.1 @ 93.5 128 157 0.79
Nissan GT-R (5/08) $72,880 1 V-6tt 480 434 3800 3.4 11.8 @ 116.5 193 108 1.01
Nissan Skyline GT-R (7/99) $92,710 I-6tt 277 293 3600 5.2 13.7 @ 103.5 112 1 120 0.89
Pontiac Grand Prix NASCAR (4/82) $60,000 V-8 590 — 3705 5.2 13.5 @ 115.0 183 121 —
Porsche 550 Spyder (2/57) $6800 H-4 137 96 1510 8.2 16.1 @ — 122 — —
Porsche 911 GT3 RS (10/07) $143,955 H-6 415 300 3195 3.9 12.1 @ 114.6 192 1 115 1.02
Porsche 911 S 2.0 (4/67) $7231 H-6 180 144 2365 8.1 15.7 @ 88.1 141 — —
Ferrari 250 GT Lusso (6/69) $13,375 V-12 290 215 2995 8.0 16.1 @ 91.0 150 — —
Ferrari 458 Speciale 3 (10/14) $291,744 V-8 597 398 3199 3.0 11.1 @ 125.7 202 102 1.01
Ferrari Enzo 3 (7/03) $652,830 V-12 650 485 3230 3.3 11.1 @ 133.0 218 1 109 1.01
Ferrari F40 (10/91) $418,700 V-8tt 478 425 2980 1 3.8 11.8 @ 124.5 192 119 0.94
Fiat 500 “Nuova” (5/59) $1289 I-2 22 22 1060 37.2 25.0 @ 52.0 67 — —
Ford 47 (6/47) — V-8 100 — 3190 21.0 — 81.3 — —
Ford Mustang (8/64) $2958 V-8 210 300 2930 9.0 16.5 @ 80.0 110 — —
General Motors EV1 3 (4/97) $27,590 EV 137 110 2870 7.9 16.3 @ 80.0 80 2 149 0.71
GMC Typhoon 3 (2/92) $29,604 V-6t 280 360 3800 5.6 14.3 @ 93.0 125 1 159 0.78
Greyhound Bus (4/69) $55,000 V-8sd 285 770 26,300 87.0 32.8 @ 44.5 70 — —
Honda 250 Motorcycle (3/61) $560 I-2 20 14 315 20.4 20.0 @ 59.2 84 — —
Honda S2000 (9/99) $33,015 1 I-4 240 153 2755 5.3 14.0 @ 99.5 150 1 119 0.92
Jaguar D-type (5/56) $9875 I-6 250 242 2460 4.7 13.7 @ 107.0 162 — —
Lamborghini Diablo 6.0 (7/00) $292,415 1 V-12 550 457 3740 1 3.6 12.0 @ 119.8 205 1 120 0.99
Lamborghini Miura S (4/70) $19,250 V-12 430 330 2905 5.5 13.9 @ 107.5 168 — —
Lancia Fulvia Zagato (9/67) $4250 V-4 87 84 2015 13.0 19.1 @ 75.0 109 — —
Porsche Carrera GT (6/04) $460,400 V-10 605 435 3530 1 3.6 11.3 @ 131.6 205 1 124 0.99
Renault Le Car (9/79) $5118 I-4 58 70 1815 12.6 19.2 @ 71.0 — 154 0.68
Renspeed RS125 Kart (11/97) $7995 1-cyl 37 1 12 195 6.0 15.8 @ 71.0 71 113 1.18
Rolls-Royce Phantom III (1/58) $12,850 V-12 160 350 5850 16.5 21.0 @ — 93 — —
Ruf CTR Yellow Bird (7/87) $142,990 H-6tt 469 457 2580 1 4.0 11.7 @ 133.5 211 — —
Shelby GT350 (6/68) $5368 V-8 315 333 3335 6.3 14.9 @ 94.0 119 — —
Subaru Impreza WRX (5/01) $24,520 H-4t 227 217 3130 5.7 14.4 @ 95.4 130 2 138 0.84
Tesla Roadster 3 (2/09) $118,400 EV 248 276 2750 4.0 12.7 @ 105.3 121 119 0.92
Toyota 2000 GT (6/67) $6800 1 I-6 150 130 2480 10.0 16.6 @ 83.0 128 — —
Toyota Supra Turbo (3/93) $39,500 1 I-6tt 320 315 3450 1 5.0 13.5 @ 107.0 155 1 120 0.98
Vector W8 Twin Turbo 3 (8/92) $489,800 V-8tt 625 630 3320 1 4.2 12.0 @ 124.0 218 1 145 0.97
Volkswagen Beetle (5/75) $2895 H-4 48 73 1860 18.1 20.9 @ — — 195 0.65
Volkswagen Golf GTI (2/85) $10,450 I-4 100 105 2125 9.0 16.9 @ 79.0 107 147 —
Yugo GV (10/86) $4853 I-4 55 52 1900 13.9 19.5 @ 69.5 — 164 0.71
LEGEND For ENGINE TYPES, I is an inline design; H is a horizontally opposed, or flat, design. V, VR, and W describe cylinder configurations; the number following
the letter is the number of cylinders. An additional letter, a “t” or an “s,” designates turbo- or supercharging; “tt” is twin turbo; “qt” is quad turbo; “d” designates diesel;
“h” designates hybrid. “FC” designates fuel cell; “EV” designates an electric vehicle. RED BOX = leader in that category. 1 estimated; 2 electronically limited;
3
automatic/automated transmission. ACCELERATION is measured with one foot of rollout subtracted. TOP SPEED is typically as reported by the manufacturer, but
we occasionally measure or estimate it. BRAKING distances are measured from the beginning of pedal depression to a complete stop. ROADHOLDING is the average
cornering grip measured around a full skidpad lap in each direction. DATA APPLIES TO THE MODEL AT THE TIME (ISSUE DATE) OF TESTING.
R&T OFFICIAL TEST RESULTS ARE MARKED IN BLUE.
106
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017

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26", 4 DRAWER
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SINGLE
SAVE
OFFANY
ITEM
$
269
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4 97
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or
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item, 3 day Parking Lot Sale item, compressors, floor jacks, saw mills, storage
149 99 VALUE
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cabinets, chests or carts, trailers, trenchers, welders, Admiral, Bauer, Cobra, LIMIT 1 - Cannot be used with other discount, coupon or prior purchase.
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• 580 lb. capacity
• Weighs 97 lbs.
• 6200 cu. in. of storage
SUPER
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ITEM 95659 shown
61634/61952
Customer Rating
Item
68498
shown
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thickness
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469
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ITEM 68287 shown
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At Harbor Freight Tools, the “Compare” or “comp at” price
means that the same item or a similar functioning item was
advertised for sale at or above the “Compare” or “comp at”
price by another retailer in the U.S. within the past 180 days.
Prices advertised by others may vary by location. No other
meaning of “Compare” or "comp at" should be implied. For more
information, go toHarborFreight.com or see store associate.

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Count Our Blessings
WE LIVED IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE AUTOMOBILE.
As this publication celebrates its 70th birthday,
let’s reflect not only on the evolution Road &
Track has gone through since the John Bond
days, but also on the industry itself. Consider
the year 1947, when R&T was founded.
Starved for new cars since 1941, the
market soaked up everything Detroit
could produce. It wasn’t just the Big
Three: We still had Packard, Studebaker,
Nash, Hudson, and even Willys,
pouring out essentially prewar cars
with cosmetic touch-ups over the next
few years. There were no foreign cars to
speak of, except for a tiny community of
in-the-know owners of MG TCs, Jaguars,
and a few early Porsches. Ignored
and ridiculed, the sports-car set found
reassurance and identity in R&T.
The 1960s and 1970s saw seismic shifts.
Imports became a factor; VW (and even
Renault) sold hundreds of thousands of
cars, and the German premium brands
became symbols of the informed. Detroit
failed to heed the loss of market share,
confident that it could outdo anybody
in any class. We could outengineer Mercedes
and, with the right compact car,
push the Japanese back into the Pacific.
Only neither ever took place. In the
Seventies, the OPEC embargo,
rising gas prices, and the mediafueled
belief the globe was running
out of oil brought about the
rise of compact four-cylinder
cars from Japan. The government
issued CAFE standards,
and U.S. firms faced
upheaval: new architectures,
drive systems, unitized
bodies, V-6 engines
to replace V-8s.
Today, we see a reborn
domestic industry.
Performance, once feared to be a victim
of emissions and fuel-economy rules, has
blossomed to levels unimaginable two
decades ago. Reliability and fit and finish
now differ slightly among various brands
and models, but no longer according to
national origin. And then, of course, we
have the tidal wave of trucks—passengercar-based
crossovers as well as rugged,
huge, heavy, body-on-frame products
powered by massive V-8s. (It’s worth noting
that no foreign brand has ever dented
the Detroit Three’s full-size-pickup sales.)
The conventional car, in sedan, coupe,
and roadster form, is in decline. But
we must count our blessings; we can,
at least, still take the wheel and drive.
For now. Autonomy is coming. Gliding
silently on electric power, the module
will arrive at your door and, with a swipe
of your credit card, take you to your destination.
The hardy individualists among
us will cry, “Oh yeah? I’ll drive my own.”
Well, it will have to be at a private track.
As for Road & Track, it will survive for
the off-highway, enthusiast market. And
what will driving be like in 2087? My
guess: There will be little, if any, actual
transportation of people. Virtual reality
will be so real that we’ll be able to experience
almost anything, attend any meeting,
from the sanctuary of our homes . . .
or whatever we’ll be living in.
A prayer of thanks, folks: We lived in
the golden age of personal transportation.
It’s on the wane, but we have a few
more precious decades. Enjoy! ■
Bob Lutz has been The Man at several
car companies. Ask him about cars, the
auto industry, or life in general.
Road & Track® (ISSN 0035-7189), (USPS 570-670) VOL. 68, NO. 10, July 2017, is published monthly, with combined issues in December/January and March/April, 10 times per year, by Hearst Communications, Inc., 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019,
U.S.A. Steven R. Swartz, President & Chief Executive Offcer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Hearst Magazines Division: David Carey, President; John A. Rohan, Jr., Senior
Vice President, Finance. © 2017 by Hearst Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademarks: Road & Track is a registered trademark of Hearst Communications, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offces. Editorial and
Advertising Offces: 1350 Eisenhower Place, Ann Arbor, MI 48108. Subscription Prices: United States and possessions: $13.00 for one year; Canada, add $10.00; all other countries, add $28.00. Subscription Services: Road & Track will, upon receipt
of a complete subscription order, undertake fulfillment of that order so as to provide the first copy for delivery by the Postal Service or alternate carrier within 4–6 weeks. Mailing Lists: From time to time, we make our subscriber list available to companies who
sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such offers by postal mail, please send your current mailing label or an exact copy to Mail Preference Service, P.O. Box 37870, Boone, IA 50037. You can also
visit preferences.hearstmags.com to manage your preferences and opt out of receiving marketing offers by e-mail. Road & Track assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. None will be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed stamped
envelope. Permissions: Material in this publication may not be reproduced in any form without permission. Back Issues: Back issues are available for purchase in digital format only from your app store of choice. Reprints: For information or reprints and
eprints, please contact Brian Kolb at Wright’s Media, 877-652-5295 or bkolb@wrightsmedia.com. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to Road & Track, P.O.
Box 37870, Boone, IA 50037. Printed in the U.S.A. CANADIAN IDENTIFICATION STATEMENT: Canada Post International Publications mail product (Canadian distribution) sales agreement no. 40012499. Canadian Registration Number 126018209RT0001.
CUSTOMER SERVICE: Visit service.roadandtrack.com or write to Customer Service Dept., Road & Track, P.O. Box 37870, Boone, IA 50037 for inquiries/requests, changes of mailing and email addresses, subscription orders, payments, etc.
JOSH SCOTT
112
ROADANDTRACK.COM JULY 2017
SUBMIT QUESTIONS TO BOB AT ASKBOB@ROADANDTRACK.COM OR VIA FACEBOOK

“EXQUISITE”
-Joshua S., Hurst, TX
ALL-NEW MAZDA CX-5
How do you enhance the already bold, distinctive
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ZOO}
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DRIVING MATTERS ®
2017 Mazda CX-5 Grand Touring available in Soul Red Crystal Metallic